"A fancy way to say 'fancy'"
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I was in a Salt Lake City shop called Caputo's that bills itself as a Market and Deli, Purveyors of Regional Italian and Southern European Foods. It reminds me somewhat of the great Di Bruno Bros. in Philly, but more on the "paisan"* side (sort of like the South Asian word "desi" as used in America to describe a small down-home food shop that caters to folks from the subcontinent).
[*I absolutely love that Italian word! So much depends on the intonation with which you say it. A scholarly disquisition on a more formal set of Italian words for the same idea is the following:
You are probably thinking of the variations of the Italian “compare” often used in various dialects in the south, particularly cumpà/compà or ‘mpare/‘mbare. From Latin “compater”, formed by “cum” (with) and “pater” (father), which originally referred to the person present with the father at a child’s baptism, the child’s godfather. Over centuries these forms became a common greeting among friends in southern dialects. Since many immigrants from Italy to the US in the early 20th century were from the south and spoke their dialects, cumpà/compà /‘mpare/‘mbare became known as Italian-American colloquialisms.
In Italian, naturally I would say fra as in fratello (brother). It is very common to shorten the word by cutting off the end and emphasizing the vowel that remains at the end. To say "hey bro" in Italian, I would use one of these: “Ehi fra…” “Oi fra…” “Ciao fra…” “Ei fra…”
Another slang term for “bro” or “dude” is “zio” (uncle, like Spanish “tío,” and has the same slang meaning in Spanish too)
It comes from one of my two favorite New Jersey undergraduate paisans who took my classes a few years ago.]
I was chatting with two of the young staff members at Caputo's and asked them what they thought of a nearby Italian trattoria. They said, "A bit too bijou". There may have been a final syllable, something like "-y; -ni", but I didn't quite catch it, at least not the consonant segment, if there was one.
So I asked them to spell the word, and neither of them could do so. Then I asked them what the word meant, and the girl said "It's a fancy way to say 'fancy'", and the guy agreed with her, "Yeah, it means 'fancy'."
I thought that was an interesting way to define a word that their auditor (me) did not have the foggiest idea of what it meant.
After I left Caputo's, I gave a lot of thought to what that word "bijou'i" was and its derivation. To tell the truth, from the moment I heard the girl say "It's a fancy way to say 'fancy'", I could not help but think of "bijoux" ("jewelry", something precious; cf. "bling"). Also, the way these two young Americans said the word and talked about it, for some reason, I couldn't escape thinking that it was Congolese, of whom there are many in the SLC area. I may be completely wrong about this, and it is merely a surmise, but "bijou'i" just seemed like a Franco-Dutch Congolese creole word with an American adjectival ending. (Hah!)
Selected readings
- "Lexical bling: Vocabulary display and social status" (11/20/14)
- "Tyrant's bling" (11/12/13)
- "Bring the bling" (1/27/06)
- "Annals of word rage" (5/2/09) — Beowulf "had a bling-bling shield".
[Thanks to Nick Tursi and Vito Acosta]
J.W. Brewer said,
September 22, 2024 @ 1:57 pm
The first vowel seems a bit off, and maybe it lacks the pejorative sting in this usage, but this is rather suggestively close to the vogue adjective "bougie" (pron. /ˈbuːʒi/ and I expect spelled variously), which wiktionary glosses in the relevant sense as "(slang, usually derogatory) Behaving like or pertaining to people of a higher social status, middle-class / bourgeois people (sometimes carrying connotations of fakeness, elitism, or snobbery)." It derives etymologically from "bourgeois." I think it may have initially been an AAVEism before spreading to The Young People more generally – both of my daughters (currently in their early twenties) use it as a natural non-affected-sounding lexeme, but it would be an affectation in my own mouth.
Victor Mair said,
September 22, 2024 @ 2:24 pm
Many thanks, J.W. Brewer.
I actually thought of "bourgeois" as a possible source too.
Laura Morland said,
September 22, 2024 @ 3:00 pm
I clicked on the link to offer my suggestion, but J.W. Brewer beat me to it.
Funny how the French-derived "bougie" sounded to you like another French word ("bijou"). Maybe it's undergoing continental drift?
P.S. Thanks for the Italian lesson. Never knew that "compare" was derived from the Latin term for "godfather"! (Although not in regular use in the way non-Italian speakers might imagine; see https://www.wordreference.com/enit/godfather)
Cervantes said,
September 22, 2024 @ 3:13 pm
Actually it's exactly the same in Spanish. Compadre, which also literally means godfather, can mean essentially a member of the speaker's community, and it gets shortened to compa or compi to mean a neighbor, with the connotation of someone who looks after one's family, basically. Actually it's hard to translate exactly but you get the idea.
Philip Taylor said,
September 22, 2024 @ 4:21 pm
In British English one night refer to, for example, a bijou residence.
Garrett Wollman said,
September 22, 2024 @ 5:51 pm
Not to disagree with J.W. Brewer above, but "bijou" is definitely part of restaurant-critic dialect, for precisely the sort of place that might also be described as a "jewel", because everything culinary sounds more sophisticated in French. A possible blend is "bijou" and "bougie" is not out of the question, especially since most young Americans are unfamiliar with French.
Peter B. Goldem said,
September 22, 2024 @ 5:52 pm
In New York City, Italian-Americans (mainly from Sicily or Naples) pronounced cumpá as gumbá. Similarly, cumáre ("mistress, girlfriend) was gumá (<gumára, gumbára).
JPL said,
September 22, 2024 @ 6:03 pm
Their response to your question what the word meant seems more like an attempt to get at the meaning they intended than a definition of the word as a part of the lexicon of English, French or whatever. I would suggest that what they were trying to get at would be better expressed not so much by "fancy" as by the English word 'precious', in the "derogatory" sense of "trying too hard to be cute or elegant".
In Lingala, the lingua franca spoken in Congo, I think 'bijou' would be a loanword from the French, with essentially the same sense. I'll try to find out if there is any further significance. Meanwhile, here's a song by the legendary TP OK Jazz, saying (just a guess, not authoritative) something like "Inquiring minds want to know, who is this girl, my girlfriend, who is so fashionable with her jewels?" (Classically starting off as a rhumba and transitioning to more danceable soukous beats.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DyCex_a2a0
For the alternative interpretation,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klpihHnnUjA
Scott P. said,
September 22, 2024 @ 7:41 pm
Many movie theaters in the 1930s and 40s were called "Bijou," a name which is still occasionally seen today, to indicate they were a classy establishment.
Chau said,
September 22, 2024 @ 11:03 pm
The Late Latin terms, compater and commāter, remind me of similar Mandarin terms, gānbā and gānmā.
In Mandarin Chinese ‘godmother’ is called 乾媽 gānmā, 乾娘 gānniáng, and 義母 yìmŭ. In Southern Min/Taiwanese it is 契母 khè-bú / khòe-bú. The definition given by Wiktionary on SM/Tw 契母 (‘adoptive mother’ > 養母 yăngmŭ) is not quite right [https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%A5%91%E6%AF%8D], I would put it as ‘nominally adoptive mother’.
In Mandarin Chinese ‘godfather’ is 乾爹 gāndiē (more commonly used), 乾爸 gānbā, and 義父 yìfù. In Southern Min/Taiwanese it is 契爸 khè-pē / khòe-pē: [https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%A5%91%E7%88%B8]. Again, ‘nominally adoptive father’ would be a better definition than is given in the Wiki.
J.W. Brewer said,
September 23, 2024 @ 6:34 am
I was not familiar with the BrEng "bijou residence" usage Philip Taylor mentions, but am interested to learn from wiktionary that that adjectival "bijou" did not derive from the noun "bijou" but came into BrEng separately from Polari (which may have gotten it from Lingua Franca alias Sabir, which in turn got it from Occitan). The daughters I mentioned in my earlier comment were, when much younger than they now are, fans of the "Fancy Nancy" series of books, in which the title character (an American girl who is maybe five or six years old) is inter alia devoted to the proposition that "Everything sounds fancier in French." Many other Anglophones have over the centuries appeared to be devoted to that proposition (as Garrett Wollman notes); I'm not sure if any have explicitly committed to the position that "Everything sounds fancier in Polari."
I'm likewise not familiar with the restaurant-critic usage Garrett Wollman mentions, so I can't even guess whether that would derive from the noun "bijou" or the Polari-origin adjective "bijou." In the interests of completeness, I should note that wiktionary also states that "bougie" has a non-pejorative sense in British and Canadian slang, meaning "Fancy or good-looking, without the same connotations of snobbery or pretentious as in" the common U.S. usage. Is it more likely that Salt Lake City would be an outcropping of Canadianisms or of Polari-isms? More research needed!
Coby said,
September 23, 2024 @ 8:44 am
In Italy, "paisan" was understood to be what Americans called Italians, as evidenced by the great film (by Rossellini) with that title.
Benjamin E. Orsatti said,
September 23, 2024 @ 9:31 am
Anecdotal confirmation of /gumbà/ as, per Cervantes, "a neighbor, with the connotation of someone who looks after one's family, basically". In Penn Hills (suburb of Pittsburgh awash with Neapolitan-speaking Abruzzese/Molisani) in the '60's, you could do a quick "logic check" to see if a particular individual fit within the molar type of "gumbà" — if the individual in question had the implicit authority to holler at your kids in your absence, or if the individual could drop in on Christmas Eve unannounced, sit at the dining room table, pour a sambuca, and jump into a game of sett' e mezz', that individual would properly be classifiable as a "gumbà".
As for "paisan'", I don't know if that word used to have more currency than it does now, but in my own lifetime (1978 –>), I'd only ever heard it deployed either "ironically", or else in, say, a pasta commercial, where the company's looking for some "ethnic" cred.
Peter Grubtal said,
September 23, 2024 @ 11:31 am
My experience is that in England the usage and spelling is as Philip Taylor mentions.
The online etymology I've found indicates that it's directly from French, but the French is likely derived from Breton, or another source suggests Occitan.
Peter Grubtal said,
September 23, 2024 @ 11:49 am
"bijou" is also in the shorter OED (first usage 1828), etymology – from French, which is from Breton.
J.W. Brewer said,
September 23, 2024 @ 12:55 pm
This would have been before Mr. Orsatti's birth, but there are photos said to have been taken circa '72 or thereabouts at Three Rivers Stadium in Pittsburgh of Steelers fans holding banners saying "RUN PAISANO RUN," with the paisan' in question (is "paisano" a vocative? or just dialect variation?) being the great Franco Harris. (He was of Italian ancestry on his mother's side and holds the interesting distinction of being, to quote wikipedia, "the first African American as well as the first Italian-American to be named Super Bowl MVP."
/df said,
September 23, 2024 @ 1:00 pm
The dual etymology of "bijou" mentioned by @J.W.B is new to me but the noun/adjective homonyms derived from bijou (Fr) and pichon (Oc) (if so) now seem to be effectively merged. In modern Britain, the French-y noun sense (which arguably was always an import) is massively less common than the adjectival sense that I always interpreted as "so small as to be ironically jewel-like", applied to a tiny pad or problemette, But will Its popularity outlast the generations exposed to Round the Horne?
Coincidentally we had a similar dual derivation with "weave" (vb. trans. vs vb. intrans.) only a couple of weeks ago.
Philip Anderson said,
September 25, 2024 @ 1:05 pm
The French ‘bijou’ meaning jewellery came from the Breton ‘bizoù’ meaning ’ring’’, from ‘biz’ (Welsh ‘bys’) finger.
The English adjective does seem to have come from Polari, but the two words have merged now.
AGG said,
September 26, 2024 @ 10:28 am
Since only bougie people say "bijou," I think it's unlikely that's the word these young people were saying.
mro said,
October 7, 2024 @ 6:54 am
I am Italian, from Veneto, and no Italian I know would say compà or paisà. That's something I could hear in movies with characters from Sicily.
My father would say "capo" (boss) when talking to someone, but that seems to not be used by a younger generation even in Veneto.
Seems that a lot of generalizations about Italians come from immigration from southern Italy. It is a country rich in variety and diversity.