Zoot Suit

Filed Under December 2008, columns | Leave a Comment

By the way, whatever became of “zarf”?

Dear Word Detective: Here’s a term to add to your lonely “Z” column. What is a “zoot suit” and what is the origin of the term? — Bill.

Ah yes, the poor lonely “Z” column in our archive index. The “B” and “C’ columns, and even the “W,” list a gazillion words, but “Z” has been limping along with naught but “Zulu time” and “Zydeco” for years now. No wonder it’s depressed. I’m surprised that the category even responds when you click on it. Anybody know an anti-depressant beginning with “Z”? I suppose there’s Zoloft, but that’s just a boring, made-up word. Maybe I should do a column on “zing.”

A “zoot suit” was a type of men’s suit popular in the 1930s and 1940s, especially among African-Americans and Hispanics. The “zoot suit” boasted high-waisted trousers very wide at the knees but pegged tightly at the ankles, and an unusually long jacket with very wide lapels and heavily-padded shoulders. Standard accessories included a keychain looping from the belt nearly to the knees, and a wide-brimmed hat, optimally sporting a long feather in the band. A quote commonly ascribed to Malcolm X described the “zoot suit” vividly as “a killer-diller coat with a drape shape, reet pleats and shoulders padded like a lunatic’s cell.”

As you can guess from that description, the “zoot suit” was not everyday wear, but usually reserved for parties or a night on the town. The origin of the “zoot suit” itself is a bit fuzzy, but the style seems to have evolved in the Harlem jazz scene of the 1930s, where such suits were originally known as “drapes.”

By the 1940s, the “zoot suit” had become popular in the Latino communities of the West Coast, and the stage was set for the style to take center stage as a symbol of friction between the Chicano and white communities of Los Angeles. The “Sleepy Lagoon murder trial” of 1942, in which twenty-two young Chicano men were wrongly accused of a gang murder, made national news and transformed the “zoot suit,” until then considered a cultural curiosity, into a symbol of menace and disorder to the larger society. The following year, a series of violent confrontations between Mexican-America youths and white sailors made national news as “the Zoot Suit Riots.” The Sleepy Lagoon trial became, in 1979, the basis of the hit Broadway play “Zoot Suit” by Luis Valdez, who directed the film version in 1981 which starred Daniel Valdez and Edward James Olmos. It’s a great film, by the way.

Given the colorful history of the “zoot suit,” the actual origin of the term is surprisingly prosaic. “Zoot suit” is simply what linguists call a “reduplication with modification,” a joking repetition like “okey-dokey,” of the word “suit,” making “zoot suit” essentially just “suit suit.”

 

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Xenophobia, Xenon

Filed Under December 2008, columns | 1 Comment

Or maybe raccoons.  I’ll bet they’re good at it.

Dear Word Detective: I was just searching your archives for the origin of “O.K.,” which you handled quite succinctly, and discovered to my amazement that there are no words under “X.” What about “xenophobic” and “xenon”? Does no one care whether or not they are related or where they came from? — John Pearson.

Well, lookie there. Apparently it’s National Neglected Letter Week. We just finished adding a “Z” word to the Word Detective website archives at www.word-detective.com, and now we’re wrestling with “X.” Does this mean we’re done and my career (such as it is) is winding down? Cool. I’ll have more time to devote to farming. Right now, I’m thinking of raising alpacas. Has anyone out there had any luck teaching them to rob banks?

Onward. I, for one, do care deeply whether “xenophobic” and “xenon” are related. Perhaps I’m unduly invested in the idea of an orderly universe, but the thought of millions of completely unrelated words bouncing around chaotically gives me a headache. Fortunately, “xenon” and “xenophobic” are close cousins. By the way, the “x” beginning both words is pronounced as a “z.”

The root of both “xenophobic” and “xenon” is the Greek “xenos,” meaning “strange” or “stranger.” Coupling “xeno” with the (also Greek) “phobia,” meaning “fear,” we get “xenophobia” meaning “fear of strangers” or, more commonly, “fear of or extreme antipathy toward foreigners.” Oddly enough for a word based on ancient Greek elements, “xenophobia” is a relative newcomer to English, only making its first appearance in print in 1909. “Xenophobia” is one of those words which, although neutral in itself, carries a pejorative tone in modern usage and is more often employed in partisan accusations than in civil discourse. The current debates in the US over immigration and foreign trade policy, for instance, have been peppered with accusations of “xenophobia.”

“Xenon,” being an odorless, invisible, inert gas making up a minuscule part of Earth’s atmosphere, is considerably less controversial. Xenon was discovered in 1898 by William Ramsay and Morris Travers, the same guys who had earlier discovered neon and krypton (thus paving the way for both Las Vegas and Superman).

In naming “xenon,” Ramsey and Travers were reflecting the fact that the gas was “strange” in that it was very heavy, as gases go, and possessed some other odd characteristics. Similarly, the name “krypton” is based on the Greek “kryptos,” meaning “hidden,” because it is rare, and “neon” on the Greek “neos,” or “new,” because it was previously unknown. These three gases are, by the way, among the six “noble gases” (”noble” in this case being used in an archaic sense of “stable” or “not reactive”), and the other noble gases (argon, helium, and radon) are also named from Greek roots (respectively, “argos” (idle, inert), “helios” (sun), and “radius” (ray, as radon is formed from the decay of radium).

 

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