"jimmying"

[Mike Salovesh]

Anne Lambert wrote:
>
> Has anybody heard the word "jimmying" as in "I was jimmying around all
> day, driving from one errand to another" or "I was jimmying around
> trying to find the place"?  My mother(born Missouri 1894 of New England
> family) used it, but I have never heard anyone else who did/does, and it
> is not in DARE.

Yes, I've heard it -- but the connection is neither Missouri nor New
England, and much less 1894.  (As usual, I'm relying on funny tricks of
how my memory for words and phrases works; also as usual, I have no
immediate written references to back up that memory.)

"Jimmy" in this sense started out as a nickname for a General Motors,
i.e., GMC, truck.  The nickname, as I recall, was pretty widespread in
rural Midwestern U.S.  Eventually, GM recognized the usage by adopting
"Jimmy" as a trademarked model name. This year, GM is advertising its
"30th anniversary Jimmy": their ads claim that Jimmies have been around
for exactly thirty years.  Today, a Jimmy is a sports utility vehicle,
or SUV, on a truck chassis; I think the original Jimmy was some kind of
pickup truck.

An early meaning of "to jimmy" was to do a bunch of trips that were
appropriate to a light truck, rather than to a passenger car.

When GM  made "Jimmy" into a model name, people who drove a Jimmy picked
up on "jimmying around".

Your quote, "jimmying around all day, driving from one errand to
another", sounds to me like someone who used a reference that was
obscure to a listener who was clearly not a Jimmy owner.  Noting
non-communication, the speaker switched to an alternative and more
clearly descriptive phrasing of the same thing.

-- mike salovesh       <salovesh at niu.edu>           PEACE !!!

P.S.:  Whoa!  Now that I think about it, I have to take back my
assertion that the phrase "jimmying around" has no connection with
Missouri.  I spent the summer of 1947 working with the American Friends
Service Committee in Shannon County, Missouri, and that's where I first
heard a GMC truck called a "jimmy".  (Note the lack of a capital letter:
I don't think "Jimmy" had yet been registered as a trademark.)

We used two trucks on our project: a WWII surplus Ford bomb carrier and
a GMC truck (which I recall as a fair-sized pickup).  Local residents
called the smaller vehicle a jimmy: "You gonna come over in that bomb
carrier or just the jimmy?"

In 1947, there was only one paved road in Shannon County, Missouri.  We
did a lot of off-road driving, sort of making our own roads as we went
along. The bomb carrier always was the lead truck on those cross-country
trips. Its wartime mission involved carrying very heavy loads at very
slow speeds, so it was equipped with a quadruple gearbox.  In quad-low
gear that truck could drive right over mid-sized trees.  We sometimes
did.