"Zoom-zooms (or zoo-zoos) and wham-whams"

[Jonathan Lighter]

Nabisco made cookies called "ZuZus" for a long time.  Don't know if they're still doing it.

  FWIW, I seem to recall once hearing the colorful candy sprinkles applied to ice cream referred to as "whim-whams" or "wim-wams," but this may be my imagination.  (The word usally means the jitters or the creeps.)  If I did hear it, it must have been  around 1972.

  JL

Jonathon Green <slang at ABECEDARY.NET> wrote:
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Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Jonathon Green
Subject: Re: "Zoom-zooms (or zoo-zoos) and wham-whams"
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Chris Waigl wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender: American Dialect Society
> Poster: Chris Waigl
> Subject: "Zoom-zooms (or zoo-zoos) and wham-whams"
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>
> But the dominant meaning seems to be prison slang for small snacks such as
> candy bars that can be bought in the prison's own store. The Urban
> Dictionary also lists _zoo zoo_:
>
> ----
>
I don't know what Jon Lighter has, but my earliest is:

1971-2 Shafer ‘Catheads [...] and Cho-Cho Sticks’ in Abernethy _Bounty
of Texas_ (1990) 217: whams, n. - cookies. [Ibid.] zoo- zoos or zuzus,
n. - cookies or candies.

All subseq. cites bear out the cookies/candies/snacks definitions and
the context is invariably prison. Most order the phr. 'zoo-zoos and...'
but Eugene Landy's _Underground Dictionary_ (1971) puts the 'wham-whams'
first.

JG

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