Behind the name$
The word “shlep” is the Yiddish verb synonymous with “to haul or carry,”
and has become one of the most widely used Yiddish terms today. We believe
that the current widespread use of the term in both the Jewish community and
across modern professional fields is sufficient enough to use it as a starting
point at UPENN, perhaps the most Jewish and professionally active university
in the country. When deciding a name, we wanted one word that could be
applied as a verb to describe the service, and could translate to nouns to
describe both the ones providing and receiving the service: for deliverers, we
are coining the term “Shleppers,” and for recipients “Sleepies & Shleppies.”
With regards to the latter two terms, we wanted to apply the service to the two
reasons why people need more time: to sleep, and/or to allocate more time to
studies, extracurriculars, etc instead of running errands and odd-jobs. While
we are confident in UPENN students’ abilities to innately correlate “shlep” with
an “odd-jobs delivery service,” we are undecided with regards to whether we
will keep the word Shlep as our incorporated name when we choose to expand
to other universities.