Saturday, October 20, 2012

Fashionable Words: Wisenheimer


[Sometimes words die out of fashion. But sometimes those words are good words, words with a certain appeal that can't be denied forever. Those words should be brought back into fashion, used frequently and used often. These are those words.]

Word:

Wisenheimer

Definition:   noun
1.  A self-assertive and arrogant person.

2.  A smart-aleck, a know-it-all.

Origin:
Another Americanism created in that Frankenstein vein where we Yanks slice and dice words from other languages, sew them together, strap it to 50,000 volts, put a charge through it and start screaming "It's alive! It's ALIVE!"

The OED claims the word originated in 1904 in a Roy Larcom McCardell book called The Show Girl and Friends, jumping on the early 20th century American slang bandwagon of adding -heimer to every word to be cheeky. (True story.) Picture Snoop Dogg's fo' shizzle craze among suburban moms about ten years ago, but with a German flare. In this case McCardell took the English wise and added to the German extract -heminer from surnames.

By 1919, H.L. Mencken spoke of the -heimer craze and how it died out, but "wisenheimer remains in colloquial use as a facetious synonym for smart-aleck, and after awhile it may gradually acquire dignity."

Yes, indeed--the dignity everyone associates with vaudeville and Abbot & Costello acts. Mencken was spot-on.

Most obscure UrbanDictionary.com definition of wisenheimer:
1.  Someone always making feeble wisecracks, who laughs at his/her own jokes and is generally deserving of severe and painful punishment.

Used in a sentence:
1.  The wisenheimer quietly mocked the teacher's lisp while sitting in the back of the class.

2.  That jamoke--he's a real wisenheimer with the way he's full of one-liners.

Word Awesomeness Scale (1 to 5):
Four.

Channels an inner Marx Brothers routine you always deny within yourself.




photo: AP

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