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.