How Do You Spell Zoozh… Zuzh… Szhuzh… That Word That Means to Spiff Up?

Hi there. You have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Joan from Buffalo.

I have a question about the word zhuzh.

Hi, Joan from Buffalo.

Zhuzh, like zhuzh in outfits?

Yeah, zhuzh in outfit, exactly.

My sister and my sister-in-law and I, we love looking at the red carpets.

And so we make these kind of photo accounts and then we comment on them together.

And I have been trying to spell the word zhuzh in these comments so many times.

And I can’t do it.

So set this up for somebody’s on the red carpet and they’re like 99% of the way there.

Their outfit’s amazing, but they just need a little tweak.

And you say they need to zhuzh it up a little bit.

Yeah, they need to zhuzh it up.

Means they need to fix it a little bit.

Yep.

I think I counted once 40-something spellings of zhuzh before it really settled down.

But it took about 50 years for its spelling to settle down.

And even now you will find on any given day at least a dozen spellings on the social networks because it is primarily an oral word.

It’s just not commonly written down.

And when you have a word that’s transmitted orally, it’s variable.

You know, what do they recommend to journalists or, you know, like what’s the official?

There’s no official.

Martha and I are going to give you our best advice.

The best choice you can make for the word zhuzh is Z-H-U-Z-H.

I agree.

Z-H-U-Z-H.

Yes.

And that’s the one that’s most common, and I think it’s listed first in most major English dictionaries.

Okay.

It’s actually in dictionaries.

Yeah, it is now.

You’ll find it in most mainstream English dictionaries.

But I want to tell you the story of the word while I have you here, Joan.

Sure.

Okay.

So it comes to mainstream English from the London theater, entertainment, and fashion worlds of the 1940s to the 1960s,

Where it was part of a jargon called Polari, P-O-L-A-R-Y.

I love Polari.

You do know Polari.

Gay slang.

Yeah, it was a gay slang.

It was also other slang, but the gay people used it a lot because gay people are in those worlds, theater, entertainment, and fashion, right?

In London.

But before it was that, it was a traitor’s jargon, a kind of recant, based in large part on Italian and Romani, an Indian dialect, which itself spun off into a bunch of sub-dialects.

And Romani, interestingly, in a variety of its dialects, has a variety of words that sound quite a bit like zhuzh that mean to clean.

So we think, linguists and lexicographers, that judge might come from Romany.

We’re not 100% sure.

There’s not enough evidence.

We’re always looking for more.

But there’s a really good chance that judge comes from Romany.

However, how did that word go from there to here?

Well, there was a BBC radio show in the 1960s called Round the Horn, which featured two characters called Sandy and Julian, who, if you listen with the modern ear, give off gay vibes.

And their pattern, their lingo was stuffed with Polari words.

Words like drag, words like camp for excessive or showy, and words like zhuzh.

So those two characters on this BBC radio show kind of launched zhuzh into the English language.

And here we are using it now.

I wonder if that’s why I use it a lot or want to use it a lot because I’m a huge fan of drag.

I’ve watched every season of RuPaul’s Drag Race since the beginning.

I think they use it on the show

And it’s just become part of my lexicon

That’s part of it

Also the first run of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy

Was a big launcher of the word

Zhuzh

Thank you so much

I’m delighted to find out that

It’s a Polari word

And I can’t wait to look more

Into the Polari words that have made it

Into my lexicon

I’m going to have to do some research

Look for Paul Baker’s books

I think one of them is called Fantabulosa

And he’s written all about the language

And it’s a fun stuff and very well researched.

Well, I’m a librarian, so I can get that for you.

There we go. Perfect.

All right. Take care of yourself.

Thank you so much.

Joan, thanks for calling.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

Bye-bye.

I got to find that.

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