Wordology, Schmoo

The origin of the word comes from Al Capp and his cartoon Lil Abner. A Shmoo is a cuddly creature that desires nothing more than to be a boon to mankind.

Shmoos are the world's most amiable creatures, supplying all man's needs. However, they reproduce so prodigiously they threaten to wreck the economy.
They require no sustenance other than air, have no bones, and reproduce asexually and prolifically. Shmoon (plural) are delicious to eat, are eager to be eaten, and taste like chicken. Nogoodniks are anti-Shmoo. They are Shmoo-shaped, but colored sickly green with yellow teeth, red eyes, and often had five-o’clock shadow, chomp stogies, and devour their friendly Shmoo cousins.

Since then, the word schmoo now has taken on other meanings. In socioeconomics, a shmoo refers to any generic kind of good that reproduces itself.

In microbiology, the cellular bulge produced by a haploid yeast cell towards a cell of the opposite mating type during the mating of yeast is referred to as a shmoo, due to its structural resemblance to the cartoon character.

In the field of particle physics, shmoo refers to a high energy survey instrument. Over one hundred white shmoo detectors were at one time sprinkled around the accelerator beamstop area and adjacent mesa to capture subatomic cosmic ray particles emitted from the Cygnus constellation. The detectors housed scintillators and photomultipliers in an array that gave the detector its distinctive shmoo shape.

In electrical engineering, a shmoo plot is the technical term used for the graphic pattern of test circuits. The term 'to shmoo means to run the test. Incidentally, there is no relationship between schmoo and schmooze.