When you fluff up pillows in your well-worn couch, or flip your shirt sleeves up just-so, or sprinkle some spices over your morning eggs, you could be partaking within the artwork of the “jeuje.” Or is it “zhoosh”? Make that “zhuzh.”
However it is spelled, the phrase is used to convey what is usually arduous to: the act of including an additional one thing particular, just a little oomph, to a dish, hairdo, outfit or any variety of issues.
But the place did it come from?
Theories abound on-line. Just a few have positioned their bets on Yiddish. Others swear the time period is Romani in origin, derived from the phrase “zhouzho,” that means clear or neat. And nonetheless others insist that it’s an expressive formation, like “whoosh.”
The most attention-grabbing origin story can also be the one with probably the most historic backing. According to Paul Baker, a linguist at Lancaster University in England, the phrase will be traced to Polari, “a secret form of language, used mostly by gay men, which flourished in the early 20th century” within the United Kingdom.
According to Baker, who has written two books on Polari, together with “Fantabulosa: A Dictionary of Polari and Gay Slang,” the language is the product of “a very complicated and nonlinear chain” of occasions. He mentioned it most likely started as office slang amongst British sailors, who, touring overseas, encountered the lingua franca of mainland Europe — ie, French — and introduced it dwelling.
Since sailors knew all method of ropes, knots and rigging equipment, they typically took jobs on land as theater stagehands and circus performers. Polari thrived amongst Britain’s fairgrounds, circuses and markets, metabolizing phrases from right here and there (together with bits of Romani), then twisting — or zhuzhing — them up.
Some Polari phrases are “back slang,” or current phrases pronounced as in the event that they have been spelled backward (“riah” for “hair,” as an example). By the twentieth century, Baker mentioned, Polari was spoken all through the homosexual group in Britain, which had been pushed underground by the nation’s legal guidelines policing sexual habits.
Baker mentioned the language allowed homosexual males to speak frankly and establish each other, however with its irrepressible jauntiness, it additionally celebrated the customs and spirit of a marginalized group. “It was additionally used for basic gossip, to be hilariously humorous, and to ‘learn’ individuals with probably the most reducing put-downs,” Baker mentioned.
Jonathon Green, who has spent the previous 40ish years engaged on a complete on-line dictionary of slang, cited early utilization of the phrase — spelled as “zhoosh”— in a 1977 article from the British newspaper Gay News: “We would zhoosh [‘fix’] our riahs [‘hair’]powder our eeks [‘faces’]climb into our bone [‘nice’] new drag [‘clothes’]don our bats [‘shoes’] and troll off [‘cruise’] to some bona bijou [‘nice, small’] bar.”
Baker places weight on the idea that the phrase “may have come about due to its onomatopoeic qualities.” Originally, he wrote in an electronic mail, “it was used in a variety of contexts, eg, to zhoosh off (to go away), to zhoosh a bevvy (to gulp down a drink), to steal something (a zhoosh bag was a) swag bag).”
“It was steadily this ‘styling’ sense that grew to become the dominant one, presumably as a result of it was extra helpful for homosexual males,” Baker mentioned.
In the Sixties, Polari shot to mainstream consciousness because of BBC radio’s common comedy program “Round the Horne, which adopted the campy adventures of out-of-work theater actors Julian and Sandy, performed by Kenneth Williams and Hugh Paddick, homosexual icons of British leisure.
“It was all double entendre, and hidden meaning, deeply wonderful stuff and no doubt would have thrilled anyone familiar with Polari, to hear it on the radio, and know what it meant,” Green mentioned.
It is attention-grabbing to notice that the phrase’s present resurgence can largely be attributed to that bastion of Twenty first-century homosexual tradition, “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy,” on which viewers delighted in Carson Kressley admonishing his hapless new topic to “jeuje” up an ensemble by popping a collar or rolling up a sleeve. “It means to tweak it, making it better, giving it some personality, your own personal touch,” Kressley mentioned. The present premiered in 2003; two years later, the Oxford English Dictionary added the phrase to its database, below the spelling “zhoosh.”
“Though some people credit me with the word, it was actually a word I learned working with Ralph Lauren and specifically Ralph and his brother Jerry who I worked directly with, styling looks,” Kressley mentioned.
Slang has traditionally emerged via spoken language; phrases did not used to seek out their means into print till they’d been closely codified. But with the start of social media and meme tradition, slang phrases are more and more hitting our eyes earlier than our ears.
“We are seeing slang words far earlier in their development nowadays,” mentioned Emily Brewster, a senior editor and lexicographer at Merriam-Webster. “And the number of years that it takes a slang word, which is markedly informally, qualify for entry has decreased dramatically.”
In the Fifties, Brewster mentioned, it took a median of 35 years for a phrase, as soon as coined, to qualify for entry within the Merriam-Webster dictionary. Today, it’s simply 11 — or much less. So is “zhuzh” destined for these storyd pages anytime quickly? “I can say it has not been drafted for entry,” Brewster mentioned, “but it is definitely one we are watching, and one that is getting closer to entry.”
Ironically, when that day occurs it would mark the top of the phrase’s attraction among the many style-minded. “We don’t really enter a word until it’s ho-hum,” Brewster mentioned, “until it’s like, ‘Nobody says zhuzh anymore.'”
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With inputs from TheIndianEXPRESS
