Unspeakable

My latest discovery in the podiverse is Unspeakable. I first became aware of this last February when the BBC aired (unexplained initially, I think – at least, the announcer didn't say that the next edition would be in more than eight months). On that occasion  MrsK and I reached for the Off button as soon as we heard that it was 'a new gameshow presented by Phil Wang', though she beat me to it (a measure of her antipathy – I'm more tolerant of self-satisfied not-very-funny comedians).

There are four sorts of contributor to Unspeakable:

• Phil Wang, who I suspect may be an acquired taste (though if so I've no interest in acquiring it)
• Susie Dent
• A panel of comics
• The audience (audience participation seems to be de rigueur nowadays)

Each of the panel champions a new word to express a thing or feeling unexpressed in English; they each suggest also a word they could do without. The only contributor who is reliably worth listening to is Susie Dent, though some of the others have their moments. In an early edition (it's been running for over a month, and I didn't make a note of the precise reference...

<inline-ps>
Found it, here. She also pointed that the first 'harlot' was a man
</inline-ps>

...) she explained something that has been puzzling me for years.

<brain-teaser time-served-in-idle-speculation="40-50 years">
Why does bimbo have a masculine ending (-o not -a) when it refers (NB: today) to a sort of woman?

Bimbo is an affectionate diminutive of a word that already has the diminutive suffix -ino: bambino (a haby boy....

<erm-not-sure>
Italian is one of my sketchier language 'conquests' (border skirmish is more like it) and for all I know the one word may serve for any baby.

<aha-but...>
But just this week I heard, on the news, an Italian woman to her bambina. Which points to bambino not being confusingly unisex.
</aha-but...>

The name 'Bambi' looks to me like a back-formation from bambino, coined perhaps by a first- or second-generation Italian-speaking immigrant to the US....

<tangent type="side-swipe, silly">
(If so, what would be the title of an Italian translation of Bambi? Babe? [I warned you it was silly.])

 <meta-tangent type="more-serious">
(But the "first- or second-generation Italian-speaking immigrant to the US" idea doesn't work, as the Disney fim is based on a book by an Austrian, whose only link to Italy that comes immediately to hand (well, to browser, actually) is that in the same year as publishing Bambi: Eine Lebensgeschichte aus dem Walde [the book the film is based on] he also published Der Hund von Florenz [a novel set partly in Florence] – which at least suggests that he may have spoken Italian].

</meta-tangent>

 </tangent>

</erm-not-sure> 

The modern English 'bimbo' refers to a less than intelligent wonan, so why isn't it bimba? 
</brain-teaser>

Susie Dent explained that the original bimbo was male. (I'm paraphrasing there. I doubt if she would have said 'original', as the etymolgy is confused and uncertain, Etymonline suggests that the word started life in the early nineteenth century, referring to a drink.)

But by the end of that century it referred (mostly) to a person:

From 1860-1910, Bimbo as a proper name is frequent: It is the name or part of the name of several race horses, dogs, and monkeys, a circus elephant (perhaps echoing jumbo), and a jester character in a play. It is in the title of a three-act musical farce ("Bimbo of Bombay"), and the name of a popular "knockabout clown"/actor in England and several other stage clowns. Also it appears as a genuine surname, and "The Bimbos" were a popular brother-sister comedy acrobatics team in vaudeville.

A separate bimbo seems to have entered American English c. 1900, via immigration....

By 1919 it began to be used generally of a stupid or ineffectual man, a usage Damon Runyon traced to Philadelphia prize-fight slang.... The word ...turn[s] up in Philadelphia papers' accounts of prizefights (e.g. "Fitzsimmons Is No Bimbo," Evening Public Ledger, May 25, 1920). The male word bimbo continues to appear as a derogatory term for a thug or bully through the 1940s ....

By 1920 the female word with a sense of "floozie" had developed, perhaps boosted by "My Little Bimbo Down on Bamboo Isle," a popular 1920 song in which the singer (imploring the audience not to alert his wife) tells of his shipwreck "on a Fiji-eeji Isle" and his "bimbo down on that bamboo isle... she's got the other bimbos beat a mile."

This Google Ngram shows how 'Bimbo' as a name (the red line) had a clear lead until about 1980, when 'bimbo' (without an initial capital, represented  by the green line) starts to ramp  up steeply, until by 2006 it is in the lead.

L'Envoi

(And I wonder if some wag at Google  decided that the Trumpian – ALL CAPS – version should be represented by an orange line.)

That's enough. This has already been long overdue.

b

Update: 2024.12.18.16:05 – Added <inline-ps />