Jimmies (2/2003 article)

[Bapopik at AOL.COM]

   I was asked off-list about "jimmies."  The PROQUEST databases didn't turn up anything good, but I'll maybe try some different search terms in the few hours I have on Wednesday before I leave.
  This article is interesting.  I was in the BOSTON GLOBE recently for "duct tape" (written by this same author) and this article also mentions ADS-member work, so I'll show the whole thing.
  From the DOW JONES database:


GIMME JIMMIES!
Jan Freeman
02/09/2003
The Boston Globe
THIRD
D.3
(Copyright 2003)

A WAR-SHADOWED week in February may seem an unlikely time for the subject of ice cream. But as word wranglers know, not all threats are international: An etymological virus is abroad in the land, and it's got to be quarantined before it spreads. The warning came in an e-mail from Margaret Geller of Newton, inquiring about the origin of jimmies -the candy sprinkles, chocolate and otherwise, that top ice cream and other treats. "I always thought it was a benign New England expression, but I recently learned that some people consider it racist," she wrote. "My hunch is that this is a false etymology, but my dictionary was remarkably unhelpful (first appeared ca. 1947, origin unknown)." Why would jimmies be racist? Geller's source didn't say, so she could only guess that it's because some people call only the chocolate sprinkles jimmies, "and it's perceived as being associated with Jim Crow." Geller's skepticism would be justified even if jimmies were only half a century old, but newer slang dictionaries give the word a birthday decades before her dictionary's 1947. Both the excellent one-volume Cassell's slang dictionary, edited by Jonathon Green, and the multivolume Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang, by J.E. Lighter, trace jimmies to the 1920s. And their source-bringing it all back home-is Boston-born John Ciardi, the poet, etymology buff, and radio personality who first tasted jimmies in his North End neighborhood.
"From the time I was able to run to the local ice cream store clutching my first nickel, which must have been around 1922, no ice cream cone was worth having unless it was liberally sprinkled with jimmies," Ciardi recalled in a National Public Radio commentary on the word in 1986. Ciardi suspected that jimmies, even if it was born in Boston, had soon gone national. "I positively recall an early Anthony Quinn movie-well, that would have been about 1940-in which he ordered an ice cream and added, 'Gimme a lot of jimmies.'" (Was it "Larceny, Inc." from 1942, which reportedly has Jackie Gleason playing a soda jerk?) Industry sources pointed Ciardi to Just Born, the Pennsylvania candy company best known for Marshmallow Peeps, which had trademarked Jimmies in the '40s. And Ross Born, now co-president of his grandfather's company, confirms that "Chocolate Grains" were made there from the late '30s into the '60s. "As the story was told to me, the candy maker responsible for processing the 'grains' was Jimmy." But Ciardi dismissed Just Born as claim- jumpers looking to trademark someone else's sweet inspiration; his jimmies came earlier, and he thought they might have been around as early as 1900. Why are they called jimmies? Evan Morris, on his language Web site www.word-detective.com, suggests that the term is descended from jim-jams in its earliest (1550s) sense: knickknacks, trivia, small things. ( Jim-jams, and the diminutive jimmies, also developed the meanings "jitters" or "D.T.s," but that's surely a different branch of the family.) But wherever the word came from, it doesn't seem to have struck anyone as racially charged. And in the first half of the 20th century, nobody would have been coy about such connotations. As any slang dictionary (and maybe your grandparents) can tell you, the n-word was casually used in everyday names for various edibles, including candy-shop treats for kids. It's not clear if the earliest jimmies were exclusively chocolate. The word soon embraced the whole rainbow of sprinkles, shot, n
onpareils, and dragees. Martha Stewart-surely our era's authority on such matters-brandished vanilla jimmies (no doubt handmade) in one TV appearance. Jimmies now come in every color. Like most folk etymologies, the jimmies slander has mysterious origins. Did it start as a joke, then spread on the breath of credulous gossip? A few years ago, picnic -despite its well-documented origins-got the same treatment: The story making the rounds (and still current at a local high school, just months ago) was that picnic originally meant a lynching entertainment, where a slave was "picked" for execution. Not a jot of truth to this one: A pique-nique, originally French (circa 1690), was an outdoor party to which everyone brought food. Neither lynchings nor guillotinings were part of the program, either in the Gallic gatherings or in England, which adopted picnic around 1800. Whatever the motives of the faux etymologists, the Internet gives them a vast (and apparently gullible) audience. Someone, someday, may prove that jimmies was a racist coinage-or that a guy named Jimmy served up the first sprinkles. But till that happens, linguistic fantasists should keep their mouths off our jimmies.


linguistic fantasists should keep their mouths off our jimmies. E-mail freeman at globe.com. For a month's worth of The Word columns, go to boston.com/globe/columns/freeman.