Thursday, October 28, 2010

Is "pizzazz" Aramaic?

IS "PIZZAZZ" ARAMAIC? Anatoly Liberman at the OUP blog is very skeptical:
Pizzazz “flair, pep, etc.” I’ll first quote part of the letter: “According to my Chambers Dictionary, Diana Vreeland made piz[z]azz popular in the thirties, but there is a similar word with a similar meaning in the Talmud. It’s entirely possible that the word traveled to America via Yiddish. [… ] I fear the NED’s long-established tendency to be Hebrew-blind might spill over into Aramaic.” NED (New English Dictionary) is the same as OED. Not being a specialist in either Hebrew or Yiddish, I can offer only very vague and inconclusive advice. Our correspondent may have found the Hebrew etymology of pizzazz in Isaac Mozeson’s dictionary The Word. If this is so, he has enough reason to distrust it, because this dictionary is a collection of moderately amusing, but mainly irritating fantasies (the author who has no knowledge of historical linguistics traces a sizable section of the vocabulary of English to Hebrew). Second, whatever the practice of OED (I am not sure it pays no heed to Hebrew or Aramaic), in English etymology it is sometimes better to be Hebrew-blind than Hebrew/Yiddish-wide-eyed. Dozens of English words, especially those related to swindling and crime and those sounding funny, have been declared Hebrew or Yiddish, with no research supporting such statements. To show that pizzazz has come to English from Hebrew via Yiddish, proof us needed that this word was sufficiently common among the New York Jews and popularized by them in slang. I am not aware of such evidence. Those lexicographers who dared offer conjectures about pizzazz suggested an unlikely blend, an imitation of a roar, and so forth. Finally, pizzazz, with its multiple z’s, has such a strong sound symbolic shape that it could easily be coined in different places at different times and refer to exuberance and zest (incidentally, zest, of French descent, also has a z and is also of unknown origin; it first designated part of a walnut and was put into drinks for flavor; similar use has been recorded in connection with pizzazz). I once dealt with the obscure etymology of razzmatazz (evidently, razz-ma-tazz), swizzle, and tizzy “nervous excitement.” They taught me great caution in dealing with z-words.
As I noted a couple of years ago, Philologos agrees.