In a recent issue of New York magazine, the media maven Michael Wolff, writing about the creative political fund raising of Howard Dean, derided as "populist fantasy" the notion "that the Internet is some great mall of ordinary, uninformed, and uninterested zhlubs who have just been more efficiently organized, and by the wonders of the medium, happily politicized." On the contrary, Wolff observed, people reached on the Internet were those "whose very engagement [even overengagement] separates them most from ordinary zhlubby citizens."
With soccer moms and angry white males fading into the mists with little old ladies in tennis shoes, political analysts evidently must now focus on the mysterious zhlub vote.
Contrary to white-bread belief, zhlub is not a variant spelling of slob. That word, which has risen from slang to "informal" in most dictionaries, means "boor" and more particularly "a slovenly person." Slob is rooted, moistily, in the Scandinavian slabb, "slime, mud," and was picked up by the Irish around 1861 to look askance at the untidy.
What is a zhlub, and what quality is expressed in its adjectival form, zhlubby?
According to Sol Steinmetz, et al, in Meshugganery, an informal dictionary of Yiddishisms, the word is spelled "schlub" and means "a crude individual lacking in social skills and blessed with insensitivity, clumsiness and no manners." A less pejorative sense is "oaf, bumpkin." A third sense, similar to nebbish, less often used, is "a person of no color." The lexicographers refer to an ad placed in the personals by a schlub reading: "Sweet Jewish guy, 40. No skeletons, no heavy baggage. No personality, either." In its form as a modifier, zhlubby is synonymous with the British naff, "unfashionable, tasteless."
The spelling presents this year's political analysts with a problem. Having bloomed in Poland as "zlob" -- that's a z with a dot over it, an l with a stick through it, an o with an accent slightly acute over it, finishing with a naked b -- the derogation is pronounced "jzwoob," which does not come easily to reporters covering candidates on the stump.
In the wonderfully inclusive fourth edition of The American Heritage Dictionary -- 2,000 pages and 4,000 illustrations, with rich etymologies and a bargain at US$60 -- the seeker after meaning can find insightful little essays about usage. Regarding the sch sound, it notes that some words are "recognizably of foreign extraction because they begin with sound combinations (shl-, shm-, shn-) not found at the beginning of native English words. Schlock is such a word; it is descended from a Middle High German word for a hit or blow, and thus came to refer to damaged merchandise, and then to merchandise of poor quality. Other words beginning with this and similar sound combinations are Yiddish also: schlep, schlemiel, schmooze, schmuck and schnoz."
In the case of the up-and-coming schlub/zhlub, I would go with the "z" spelling, to differentiate it from the muddier slob.
Over-egged?
I was filing a column from the London bureau of The New York Times when Warren Hoge, the bureau chief, poked his head in the visitors' cubicle. "Would the verb over-egging be familiar to an American reader?"
On behalf of American readers, I told him egged on would be taken to mean "urged," egghead would be taken to mean "intellectual" and egg cream was a New York soda fountain's admixture of seltzer and chocolate sauce. Hoge, working on deadline, figured this meant no, I never heard of over-egged, but hated to admit it.
Lord Hutton, conducting an inquiry into the death of David Kelly, a British intelligence analyst, wanted to know if an evaluation of Iraq's threat had been exaggerated (in the American vernacular, hyped). The Times correspondent reported that a UK Ministry of Defence official, Brian Jones, told the inquiry that some scientists had "worried that the authors of the dossier were `over-egging certain assessments,' he said, using a British colloquialism for being excessive."
That sent me to the Oxford English Dictionary. "To over-egg the pudding, to argue a point with disproportionate force; to exaggerate."
This metaphor of a dessert enriched with too many eggs is currently used in British politics: "Some of the recent (election) forecasts," reported London's Times in 1976, "may have over-egged his pudding."
The American equivalent of stretching a point is one sense of juiced up, but we are more likely to gild the lily (misquoting Salisbury in Shakespeare's King John: "to gild refined gold, to paint the lily"). I cannot think of a common US metaphor for throwing a perfume on the violet or making a tale taller, which goes to show that you can indeed teach a visiting pundit to suck eggs.
Sexed up
The hot phrase among headline writers in Britain this summer was sexed up. The BBC's Andrew Gilligan quoted a source later revealed to be David Kelly as saying an intelligence report was "transformed ... to make it sexier." This was then transformed into sexed up.
The 1942 American Thesaurus of Slang defined sex it up as "to introduce sex into, as a story." Britain's Observer in 1958 wrote, "The business of 'sexing up' the titles of foreign films is a trick well known in both France and Britain."
Tom Wicker in a 1964 book review noted that Henry Adams' Democracy was a novel "that might go pretty well in paperback today if they sexed up the title." And Tom Wolfe titled a Life magazine article The Sexed-Up, Doped-Up, Hedonistic Heave of the Boom-Boom `70s.
The phrase has nothing to do with copulation. Its predecessors were spiced up, or "given added piquancy;" and tarted up, or "dressed flashily and provocatively."
"While sexy can be good," Jan Freeman astutely noted in The Boston Globe, "sexed up suggests fakery."
When US budget carrier Southwest Airlines last week announced a new partnership with China Airlines, Southwest’s social media were filled with comments from travelers excited by the new opportunity to visit China. Of course, China Airlines is not based in China, but in Taiwan, and the new partnership connects Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport with 30 cities across the US. At a time when China is increasing efforts on all fronts to falsely label Taiwan as “China” in all arenas, Taiwan does itself no favors by having its flagship carrier named China Airlines. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs is eager to jump at
The muting of the line “I’m from Taiwan” (我台灣來欸), sung in Hoklo (commonly known as Taiwanese), during a performance at the closing ceremony of the World Masters Games in New Taipei City on May 31 has sparked a public outcry. The lyric from the well-known song All Eyes on Me (世界都看見) — originally written and performed by Taiwanese hip-hop group Nine One One (玖壹壹) — was muted twice, while the subtitles on the screen showed an alternate line, “we come here together” (阮作伙來欸), which was not sung. The song, performed at the ceremony by a cheerleading group, was the theme
Secretary of State Marco Rubio raised eyebrows recently when he declared the era of American unipolarity over. He described America’s unrivaled dominance of the international system as an anomaly that was created by the collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of the Cold War. Now, he observed, the United States was returning to a more multipolar world where there are great powers in different parts of the planet. He pointed to China and Russia, as well as “rogue states like Iran and North Korea” as examples of countries the United States must contend with. This all begs the question:
In China, competition is fierce, and in many cases suppliers do not get paid on time. Rather than improving, the situation appears to be deteriorating. BYD Co, the world’s largest electric vehicle manufacturer by production volume, has gained notoriety for its harsh treatment of suppliers, raising concerns about the long-term sustainability. The case also highlights the decline of China’s business environment, and the growing risk of a cascading wave of corporate failures. BYD generally does not follow China’s Negotiable Instruments Law when settling payments with suppliers. Instead the company has created its own proprietary supply chain finance system called the “D-chain,” through which
RSS