This discussion had gone so far from Food of Shame, I thought I'd start a new thread.

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Originally posted by missann:

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Originally posted by wordmatic:
They always bother me. I am reading Eats, Shoots and Leaves now and roaring with laughter over all of the stories of misplaced apostrophes on signs all over the world. The image of Lynn Truss standing outside the movie theater holding up an apostrophe on a stick next to the place it should have been on the sign for Two Weeks Notice really tickles me! I don't think I'm such a raving intellectual, but dammit, if sentences contain no contractions or possessives, then there is no reason to sprinkle apostrophes over them like jimmies on a cake!

Wordmatic

How common is the term "Jimmies" for the chocolate sprinkles in cakes and ice cream? I thought it was a regional word.

I've only lived in the Eastern part of the U.S., and in my experience, could buy jimmies in the baking ingredients section of any grocery store or ask for them to be sprinkled on my ice cream cone just about anyplace, but it looks as if you are correct. This Wikipedia article explains that it is from the Boston area. I first remember being aware of the term when I lived in Upstate New York as a young adult (I had not done much baking as a child or adolescent in Southern Ohio. I know my mother had jimmies on the shelf, but cannot swear that they were called that on the label.)

I see in the dictionaries online that in British listings, the only use of "jimmy" is the one meaning the crowbar-like tool a burglar would use to break into a house, spelled "jemmy" over there. Here, the burglar would "jimmy" the door or the window. No reference to candy sprinkles--or to the weird tartan Jimmy hats with bad wig hair that they sell to clueless tourists in Scotland.

Wordmatic

Thanks for starting a new thread for this question, Wordmatic. As I had said in the other thread, I have heard the word jimmies used this way, but where I come from it is much more common to use the word "sprinkles."

What you call sprinkles or jimmies we call hundreds-and-thousands.

"Jimmy" and "jemmy" are used pretty well interchangeably to mean a crowbar. "Jimmy" is also used as an all-purpose term of address in Glasgow, Scotland; "See you, Jimmy" means "Good-day, my friend".

Jimmy is also Cockney rhyming slang.

In the States, jimmy is usually a verb, but in times past it used to be a noun. A burglar jimmies open a door or a window with a crowbar.