A South Carolina listener recalls that his father referred to the younger man’s girlfriend with a term that sounded like jing floogy or jing floogie. The word floogie has long been a synonym for floozy, a term applied to women, and often specifically to a woman of loose morals. A 1938 recording by Slim Gaillard and Slam Stewart of a bouncy song called “Flat Foot Floogie (with the Floy Floy)” further popularized the term. As for the jing, who knows? Jean as in jeans? Or gin, maybe? This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Mystery of Jing Floogy”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hey, how’s it going?
This is Laith Harris from Lexington County, South Carolina.
Well, welcome to the show, Laith. We’re glad to have you. What’s on your mind?
Well, I have a word that I’d like for you guys to expound on. My favorite uncle was from Western North Carolina, just out of the Appalachian Mountain Range in Western North Carolina. Served from time in the Seabees during the Second World War in the Philippines. Was a cutter grinder by trade. But when we would walk around him and greet him at the age of maybe 14 or 15, this would have been in about 1965-ish, he would always ask us how our girlfriends were, and he would use a word, Jean Flutie. He’d say, hey, what’s your Jean Flutie doing today? So I used that with my daughters. I’ve never heard anybody else use the word before. One of my granddaughters has a boyfriend, and I asked her about her Jing Flutie, and she challenged me on it. I said, what does that mean? So I thought, you guys would be the source to come to to see what’s going on.
Laith, any idea how to spell that? Or is it one word or two words or three?
I have no idea. This is all oral history.
Okay. All right. Some ideas here. And the main one is that Floogies, that’s F-L-O-O-G-I-E-S, or with a Y in the singular, has long been a synonym for Floozy, F-L-O-O-Z-Y. But before I get up in arms about it, know that Floozy wasn’t always a big insult. Sometimes it just meant somebody who went their own way. Maybe they were a little messy and maybe a little unfashionable, but they weren’t sexually promiscuous or anything like that. It did eventually get that meaning, but Floogie as a synonym for floozy has existed for probably the 1930s, since the 1930s. And there was a real moment in the development of Floogie as a term because there was a 1938 song called The Flatfoot Floogie with the Floy Floy by Slim Gylard and Sam Stewart. I don’t know if that’s how you say Gylard, but it’s G-I-L-L-A-R-D. And apparently, as the story goes, their record company wanted them to change the name because originally it was Flatfoot Floozy. And by that time, floozy could be seen to mean prostitute or somebody who slept around. And that song became a huge hit, Flatfoot Floogie. It was number two on the Billboard charts. It was covered many times over the decades after the 1930s by a number of famous singers and musicians. And so that’s kind of really put Floogie out there as a term for people to pick up.
The big question for us is, though, if we accept the idea that Floogie means floozy, is what is the jean doing? And I really think it’s just a reference originally to this new post-war casualness of dress of the younger set, where they would wear jeans as a fashionable item. And it certainly happened before World War II.
It certainly did. But after the word was even more pronounced, this idea that genes were okay in pretty much any environment.
Okay. Well, I get that. I thank you for that. I want to add one little piece of it. On the gene, there’s a G on the end. So it was always a Jing Floogie.
Oh, really? A Jing Floogie?
Yeah. I did not hear that.
Oh, this is a whole… I’m sorry about that. I still don’t have any instances, known instances of somebody saying Jing Floogie. But that doesn’t mean that our audience, which, you know, spreads from coast to coast in North America, they may come back to us with some new information. And that’s always the nice thing about the folks who listen. They’ve got some stuff that we don’t have. Crowdsourcing is wonderful.
My wife, she said, well, I think it has to do with gin floozy.
Gin floozy. So, you know, maybe a gal that goes her own way but drinks a little too much gin or somebody that I met at the bar or something like that.
I think your wife is a smart woman, but you probably knew that already.
Are you sure? Yeah. It’s something worth investigating, and I’ll make a note here to look and see if I can find examples of gin floozy or gin floogie being used that way. That’s a real strong hypothesis.
Awesome. Well, thanks very much. This has been a lot of fun. We really enjoy your show an awful lot.
It’s our pleasure, Lee. Thank you for spending time with us today.
Excellent. Thank you. Bye-bye.
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