Borrowed fromYiddishשטיק(shtik,“shtick, act, piece”). Cognate withGermanStück,Dutchstuk.Doublet ofshtuka andsteck.
shtick (pluralshticks)
- A generally humorousroutine.
1974,Julian Barry,Lenny:Sally Marr: Lenny [Bruce] used to do ashtick between strippers. / The Interviewer: What kind of stick? / Sally Marr: No, it'sshtick, darling,shtick.
1991,Douglas Coupland, “Celebrities Die”, inGeneration X, New York: St. Martin's Press,→OCLC,page111:Dag and I are drying glasses, a strangely restful activity, and we're listening to Mr. M. do his Mr. M.shtick. We feed him lines; it's like watching a Bob Hope TV special but with home viewer participation.
1995, Rik, quotee,MacUser, volume11, MacUser Publications,page147:But even greatshtick can get old real fast: the dreadedSaturday Night Live syndrome.
1997,David Foster Wallace, “David Lynch keeps his head”, inA Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, Kindle edition, Little, Brown Book Group:By its thirtieth episode, the show had degenerated into tics andshticks and mannerisms and red herrings, and part of the explanation for this was that [David] Lynch was trying to divert our attention from the fact that he really had no idea how to wrap the central murder case up.
2009 June 8, Campbell Robertson, “In Iraq, Colbert Does His Shtick for the Troops”, inThe New York Times[1],→ISSN:The troops didn’t seem to care much about the meta-ness of Mr. [Steven] Colbert’s visit, nor were they uneasy about his politicalshtick as they laughed at the gags about clearing Iraq of weapons of mass destruction[…]
- Acharacteristictrait ortheme, especially in the way people or media present themselves.
2001 April 22,William Safire, “Shtick”, inThe New York Times[2],→ISSN:Like you, I have stumbled through life without knowing what an umlaut signifies and looked it up today only because language is myshtick.
2012 August 21, Jason Heller, “The Darkness:Hot Cakes (Music Review)”, inThe Onion AV Club[3]:Self-mythology has always been part of The Darkness’shtick, but here Hawkins and crew forget to back it up with music catchy enough to transcend the solipsism.
2014 January 21, Hermione Hoby, “Julia Roberts interview for August: Osage County – 'I might actually go to hell for this…'”, inThe Daily Telegraph (Review)[4], archived fromthe original on2018-02-01:[…] however hard she pushed the tough-talkin’shtick, she remained doe-eyed, glowing and somehow unassailably demure.
2016 April 7, Sabrina Siddiqui, “Ted Cruz: Republicans' only love, sprung from their refocused hate”, inThe Guardian[5]:Whether [Ted] Cruz can, in fact, build the relationships he would need within the halls of the Capitol if he is to be the nominee – and whether doing so would undermine his anti-Washingtonshtick – remains an open-ended question.
2017 October 4, Jonathan Freedland, “Boorish Boris: Johnson’s Libya joke is proof he cannot do his job”, inThe Guardian[6]:Why, [Jacob Rees-]Mogg even offers the sameshtick: Etonian accent, Latin tags, supposedly lovable Wodehousian eccentricity, sub-Churchillian evocation of the glorious past of this island race.
2023 October 20, Marina Hyde, “Rishi Sunak, decorated hero of the war on motorists, is no match for a real-world conflict”, inThe Guardian[7], UK:Johnson’s approach to that deadly crisis was to only lightly repurpose hisshtick into the equivalent of “Get Covid done”
- Agimmick.
