William Safire’s column today is neither so idiotic as to require yet another Safire-flogging nor so informative as to be cited for its own sake (it’s a routine investigation into the history of the phrase “tipping point”), but it uses a spelling variant that leapt out at me and sent me running to the dictionaries. In the course of trying to find a replacement for the now overused phrase, he says: “Turning point? Not a lot of bezazz, and it does not express the idea of the straw that breaks the camel’s back…” Bezazz! I knew the word “pizzazz” had variants, as befits such an irrepressibly slangy term, but I hadn’t seen this one. Merriam-Webster gives only “pizazz” as an alternate, while American Heritage allows you to simplify either of the z clusters, but neither offers a version in b-. Then I tried the OED, and bingo: “Also bezaz, bezazz, bizzazz, pazazz, pazzazz, pezazz, pizazz, pizzaz.” Now there’s generosity for you; in fact, I wonder whether there is any entry for which they offer more variants. The curious thing, though, is that all the citations with initial b– seem to be British:
1964 New Statesman 28 Aug. 291/1 A Shakespeare one [sc. exhibition].. with most of its bezazz—pop art, wire sculpture, giant beefeaters—left by the Avon. 1965 Sunday Times (Colour Suppl.) 16 May 12/1 She.. still wears trousers frequently. ‘I don’t really feel happy in bezazz.’ 1968 Daily Tel. 24 Dec. 8/4 Miss [Ginger] Rogers has ‘bezazz’, as was obvious from the number of reporters and photographers clustering round her. But Mr. Marshall.. claimed it should be ‘pezazz’, derived from American TV commercials and meaning something like effervescence.
The last one is particularly interesting, implying as it does a difference between U.K. and U.S. usage. I’m hoping The Discouraging Word will get on the case and turn up further information. (This entry can, by the way, be considered a bookend to a previous one on a rare variant spelling for “flibbertigibbet.”)
I detest Safire most of the time, but I do love the way you slap him around. It’s sort of like watching a very talented boxer dance around a bag. (Bag, Safire….yeah, that sounds about right….)
See now this Wordorigins thread, especially ktschwarz’s update:
And no attempt at etymology that I can find. Was the word completely made up?
The OED updated their entry in 2006; the first cite is now:
And they have a bunch more spelling variants:
The etymology (to belatedly answer DM’s question) is:
I’m hoping The Discouraging Word will get on the case and turn up further information.
This did indeed happen; see the entries for July 28 and July 29, 2003.
“Spiz(z)az(z)” is out there as well, though it’s too rare for any dictionaries except urbandictionary.com; it’s been found as far back as 1937 in a cookbook called 10,000 Snacks (quoted by Barry Popik): “Beyond the citrus belt are the snake farms, and from there come smoked rattlesnake tidbits that put the spizzaz in cocktail parties.”
The Discouraging Word could only find “bezazz has been used in the NYT what seems only once since 1857 (and before this weekend), on 9 Feb 1964”. But Google can now add a couple of hits to that, both in Safire’s column: 1988, 1995. I guess Safire preferred that spelling?
As for the question of whether bezazz is more British than American, the Google ngram agrees with that at least for the range of ca. 1970–2010. Still, it’s much less common than the p- spellings in both the US and UK corpora. It can be found occasionally in the US in the 1950s-60s, e.g. “taste and bezazz and verve and elegance” from Sex and the Single Girl (1962, very American).
I would have guessed some kind of jocular modified pétillant = sparkling (as vin pétillant) maybe starting from the noun.
I’m afraid the intersection of the group of English-speakers who are familiar with pétillant (which I confess I barely am) and those likely to create a slang term like pizzazz approaches zero.
As noted in the OED, Diana Vreeland liked to talk about “pizzazz”, and so does the movie version of Vreeland in Funny Face (1957). Now here’s an interesting demonstration of the fallibility of memory. Screenwriter Leonard Gershe told a journalist, decades later:
This is confabulated from end to end: you can go to the Wordorigins link above to see the 1937 Harper’s Bazaar spread headlined “This thing called Pizazz”, with a P. And all the early uses in print are with p. But inevitably, Gershe’s version is now circulating all over. More at Stack Exchange.