Learn English – What does “to have a little form” mean

Found a little history on the word. It is indeed Yiddish:

shprits
spurt, to squirt, to sprinkle ∙ (m.) שפּריץ

Neal Karlen in The Story of Yiddish: How a Mish-Mosh of Languages Saved the Jews, says the word took on new meanings within a community of young Jewish comedians (exemplified by Lenny Bruce) in New York in the 1940s:

Using Yiddish as a base, the young Jewish comics helped develop only the second art form indigenous to the United States: the shpritz, a.k.a. "Jewish jazz." (African-American jazz is often thought of as the only such legitimate claimant. Curiously, "jazz" is slang for ejaculate: shpritz is Yiddish for "spray." Talk amongst yourselves.)

Wikipedia has this description from Albert Goldman of Lenny Bruce "shpritzing" during a famous Carnegie Hall concert:

Lenny worshipped the gods of Spontaneity, Candor and Free Association. He fancied himself an oral jazzman. His ideal was to walk out there like Charlie Parker, take that mike in his hand like a horn and blow, blow, blow everything that came into his head just as it came into his head with nothing censored, nothing translated, nothing mediated, until he was pure mind, pure head sending out brainwaves like radio waves into the heads of every man and woman seated in that vast hall.

Because of the word's historical association with Jewish comedy, its use in the quote you found is quite appropriate and well-chosen—even if a bit esoteric.

It’s a British expression, now used quite generally of university study, that used to be especially common at Oxford and Cambridge. I suspect that it reflects the way in which education was traditionally organized at those universities: a series of set-piece lectures, not necessarily compulsory, and a great deal of independent reading that was regularly discussed with a tutor, either individually or in small seminars. However important the lectures were (or in some cases perhaps weren’t), the bulk of a serious student’s time and energy went into reading, digesting what was read, and writing based on that reading, especially in subjects like history, literature, and philosophy. In this setting reading history (say) would be a natural pars pro toto.