Joan from Buffalo, New York, wants to know how to spell a particular word that means to spiff up, clean up, straighten, or fix. The word is zhuzh, which has had dozens of different spellings over the years because it’s primarily transmitted orally, rather than on the page. It comes from the jargon called Polari, used in the London theater, entertainment, and fashion worlds in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, and strongly associated with the gay subculture of the time. Before that, it was trader’s cant based largely on Italian and the language of the Romani, which happens to have a word that sounds like zhuzh that means “to clean.” A BBC Radio show in the 1960s called Round the Horne featured two characters whose on-air patter was filled with Polari words, including drag, camp, and zhuzh, and helped popularize the term, as did the original Queer Eye for the Straight Guy reality TV show launched in 2003. This is part of a complete episode.
If you start the phrase when in Rome… but don’t finish the sentence with do as the Romans do, or say birds of a feather… without adding flock together, you’re engaging in anapodoton, a term of rhetoric that refers to the...
There are many proposed origins for the exclamation of surprise, holy Toledo! But the most likely one involves not the city in Ohio, but instead Toledo, Spain, which has been a major religious center for centuries in the traditions of both Islam and...
Subscribe to the fantastic A Way with Words newsletter!
Martha and Grant send occasional messages with language headlines, event announcements, linguistic tidbits, and episode reminders. It’s a great way to stay in touch with what’s happening with the show.
