Donald Trump, the freewheeling front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, has the news media in the uncomfortable position of defining the term “schlonged.”
It’s not a word that shows up in any respectable dictionary but Trump used it as a form of slang at a campaign rally Monday in Grand Rapids, Mich.
Referring to Hillary Clinton’s defeat for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008 by Barack Obama, Trump said, “She was favored to win and she got schlonged.”
Trump apparently used it as a synonym for “badly beaten,” though the root word is generally recognized as slang for a man’s penis. In a slow news week ahead of Christmas, the media struggled to report it.
The New York Times called it “a boorish word for a penis.”
The Wall Street Journal said it’s a Yiddish term for “a penis.”
“Odd Yiddish vulgarity,” wrote USA Today reporter Paul Singer, who defined schlong as “an obscene term for male genitalia.”
CNN.com: “a vulgar Yiddish word for a man’s penis.”
NBC News would only call it “a sexually derogatory comment.”
Both CBS News and ABC News would not print the word on their websites, with ABC calling it “a sexually derogatory remark” and CBS dubbing it “an off-color word.”
The Washington Post went a step further and said that Trump was using “a vulgar noun” that specifically refers to “a large penis.”
A reporter from the Post did not respond to a request for comment on how she settled on the size portion of the definition.
