Is the word "Brummagem" offensive?

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This is a question for UK readers: Is the word Brummagem offensive?

If you don't know what it means, great!

The word is pivotal in a story I'm working on, and if it's one that offends, I'll have to find a substitute.

thanks!

Update: I've decided to find a different, simpler word.

Comments

Interesting question

As far as know it has two meanings. Firstly is one variant on the name of the City of Birmingham but has gone out of use in favour of the word 'Brum'. A 'Brummie' is someone from Birmingham

The other one is fairly derogatory ie. it means "showy but inferior and worthless". Ironically, that can apply to a good few Brummies I've encountered over the years.

Another definition of it could make it apply to the gang popularised by the TV series 'Peaky Blinders'.

I don't think it is offensive but most people wouldn't really know what it means in the first place.

Samantha

Did you look it up?

BarbieLee's picture

It's a colloquialism (area specific) lots of different meanings but "cheap and tawdry" is one. Is anyone going to be offended if you use the word? Undoubtedly in this day and age of the perpetually offended. Those who surf BCTS are a pretty liberal bunch and seldom take offense unless someone attacks them personally.
Use of colloquialisms makes a story a lot more real for lack of better definition. If we didn't use yu'all, bless your heart, sweety, come eer, (come here), put tars on ur car, yu'd thinks we wus from the nurth, heaven forbid. Lee would turn over en his grave, rest his soul.

The difference between a Yankee and a Damn Yankee is
A Yankee comes to visit
A Damn Yankee comes and stays.

And for god's sake don't ask Erin about colloquialisms. She's an Arkansas Hillbilly, even I can't understand that girl half the time. They have a language all their own.

Do what yur comfortable with hon.
hugs
Barb
Life is a gift, treasure it.

Oklahoma born and raised cowgirl

Did I look it up?

Iolanthe Portmanteaux's picture

No, of course not! I shook out some tiles from a Scrabble set, and they formed what looked like a word.

- io

That Word

Daphne Xu's picture

Surprisingly, that word is actually pronounceable.

I must be a Damn Yankee then. But at least I hope I'm doing right with Texas.

-- Daphne Xu

It's the norm until the "outsiders" get accepted

BarbieLee's picture

Okie was a derogatory term during the Dust Bowl days when Oklahoman's starved out and moved to California. Personally I was always proud to be called an Okie but then I'm weird in a lot of ways.
My bestest friend moved from Wisconsin to Oklahoma in the seventies when the nation was in a mini depression and the Oklahoma oil boom meant wild abandonment and every good and evil that came with it. He almost didn't stay during that first summer and the jokes got thick.
Oklahoma is where hot water comes out of both sides of the tap.
The best parking space isn't close to the entrance, it's several blocks away under the shade trees.
Them damn foreigners are stupid enough to lean up against their car with their bare skin. And then it's to the emergency with serious burns.
No one wears a mini skirt and sits on a dark seat.
All the vehicles sold in Oklahoma have light colored seats.
Oklahoma is only fit for rattlesnakes and lizards
Does the wind ever stop blowing here? Asked one joker.
Okies are the only people I know who call a thirty mph gale a gentle refreshing breeze.

Daphne, them yanks brought their own sense of humor with them and a kazillion jokes about how they loved Oklahoma..., not.
Hugs hon, no matter who we are, or where we live, it's the same the world over.
Barb
Life is a gift, treasure it.

Oklahoma born and raised cowgirl

KWYJIBO????

joannebarbarella's picture

Got no idea what that means. Veronica, Please explain!

However, back to Brummagem. Firstly, either way it's very old-fashioned. It was probably first used in connection with the Birmingham, England dialect/accent but was also used to mean "cheap", "showy", i.e. not worth much, and as such was insulting. It's not a word you hear much these days.

The Simpsons was my favorite show for 15-18 years, but then...

laika's picture

I don't know if it was the show or it was me or a combination of both, but I started finding it less and less funny, until it seemed like nothing they did could make me laugh. But before that happened I was inspired to write my 3rd story here back in 2007: https://bigclosetr.us/topshelf/fiction/3883/springfield-is-b...
~yes, shamelessly plugging my own stuff again; Hugs, Veronica

I can only add

Sammi's picture

If it is offensive to anyone, it's Jeremy Clarkson's fault

Brum for the people and Brummagem for the city hails from the sound cars make and that Birmingham had been most famous for the UK car industry plants that made Austin\British Leyland\Rover cars

Clarkson was forever ridiculing the area


"REMEMBER, No matter where you go, There you are."

Sammi xxx

Actually ...

persephone's picture

The word predates the automotive industry and can be traced back to the 17th century.

Persephone

Non sum qualis eram

I wasn't commenting on the

Sammi's picture

origin of the word, just its use in connection to Birmingham in more recent history, and why the folks in and of that area may or may not find it offensive


"REMEMBER, No matter where you go, There you are."

Sammi xxx

Not in the slightest

Having lived there for twenty five years and, finally, learned to understand the accent, I can tell you that 'Brummagem' is often used by older folk. The young 'uns just say Brum. Usage of 'Birmingham' is mostly a reference to the football club. You don't go to Birmingham, you go to 'Town'.

I believe that the name derives from a village not far from Castle Bromwich - Bromwicham.

Penny

Frisco

erin's picture

I think it's like Frisco. Sure, it annoys some San Franciscans but they're pretty good-natured about it.

Or maybe it's like Ellay? No one even notices that you didn't actually use the name of the city?

Probably not like Nawrlunz where that is the real name of the place, it's just got a weird spelling. :)

Then again, you can get into a discussion about Se'nlooie, MO or Pee'eblow, CO or Moscoe, ID. :)

Hugs,
Erin

= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.

being California born and raised (by Indiana "immigrants")

Teresa L.'s picture

Frisco was never considered an insult when i was living near there (even then not a lot could afford to live there, lol) i never knew it had ANY bad connotations, but maybe something only insiders who live there long term?

Teresa L.

San Francisco

No native San Franciscan would ever name their city as anything but San Francisco. The only time someone from San Francisco would use the word "Frisco" is if they were talking about the St. Louis-San Francisco railway (which never got within a 1,000 miles of San Francisco) or the city of Frisco, TX.

The use of Frisco for San Francisco is not an insult; it simply shows that the person using the word is not from San Francisco. I remember a kids detective book (Encyclopedia Brown?) where one of the clues was someone claiming to be from San Francisco used Frisco to describe the city. That was one clue that I caught.

Long Term...

I was born in San Francisco in 1950, and have lived in or in close proximity to it (Berkeley, Oakland, Daly City) all my life.

The phrase "don't call it Frisco" goes back further than I do, and apparently was often the first thing a new resident was told after moving here. From what I was hearing and reading, i think it was considered insulting back then, more than simply ignorant, if someone did it consistently. (Herb Caen, the "three-dot" newspaper columnist who was considered our most influential and most popular writer, would frequently title part of his dally collection of short items "Don't Call It Frisco Roulette".)

In 1961, one of the two local Top 40 radio stations brought in a new morning drive DJ from Los Angeles, Don MacKinnon, who told his listeners on the first day that he was going to call it Frisco until someone gave him a reason not to. (In the last hour, he got a phone call from a woman who told him he was denigrating Saint Francis of Assisi, for whom the local Spanish mission and eventually the surrounding community was named back in the 19th century. Only time I've ever heard that, FWIW.) He didn't last very long before returning to SoCal (a term not in general usage back then, at least up here).

I'm told there were Millennials who were told the same thing about "San Fran", as a nickname to avoid. I'm not sure anyone my age objected to it; I didn't, though S F (Ess Eff) was preferable.

The real nickname used by San Franciscans, one that went back further than I did, was "the City". (In the days before postal codes -- ZIP codes, here in the U.S -- the story goes that someone in a small Midwestern town about 2000 miles away tried to pay a local utility bill by mailing a check to "Water Dept., City" and it turned up in San Francisco.) I think the name really does go back to the days after the 1849 Gold Rush when we were basically the only large city on the West Coast, but in any case, residents of the Bay Area were calling it the City for a long time,

The name got some publicity in the mid-1960s when the San Francisco Warriors NBA basketball team (later Golden State) introduced new uniforms with that, along with a bridge on the front and a cable car surrounding the uniform number on the back. I'm not sure the term was capitalized until the Warriors did that, though.

Eric

Ellay

Daphne Xu's picture

I really don't know why, but here in Texas, I'm always nervous about calling Los Angeles, LA. I always wonder whether it refers to Louisiana. Not like in Boston, where we knew it referred to LA.

But it's here that I realized that pronouncing "New Orleans" to rhyme with "Evergreens" isn't exactly right. One of the two Magic Kingdoms in the USA calls one of its regions as "New OR lee-ans Square".

I wonder what the people of Montreal think of our pronunciation of their city's name. Then there's Vermont -- the French Pronunciation of which means "Green Mountain." Particularly interesting in that "Green Mountain Energy" is a Texas company. And I read somewhere that Pennzoil is a Texas company, while Texaco is a Pennsylvania company.

-- Daphne Xu

Regional pronunciations or "the right way"?

Iolanthe Portmanteaux's picture

Yes, it's such a puzzle.

Here in Massachusetts we have plenty of place names that out-of-staters pronounce incorrectly. Like Peabody (pee-bah-dee, said quickly), Scitutate (sitch-you-it), and the names we inherited from England, like Worcester (wooster), Gloucester (glosster), Leicester (lester), Leominster (lemon-ster). Or, if you've got the regional strangeness about the "r" sound, woostah, glosstah, lesstah, lemonstah.

And of course there are cute youtube videos of Americans quite confidently mispronouncing English place names.

- io

of course

Maddy Bell's picture

Leominster is pronounced 'Lemster' in the UK!


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Madeline Anafrid Bell

Brum

Speaker's picture

"Brummagem" for Birmingham (UK) is not used very often these days - the shorter forms "Brum" for the city and "Brummy" (plural "Brummies") are quite common and not usually considered offensive.
"Brummagem" for "tawdry", "cheap", "inferior" or "poor quality" dates back to the city's early manufacturing days when mass production of toys was just taking off - and in those days toys weren't something you played with but small knick-knacks like buttons, pins, and broaches. This usage is definitely historical - if you're writing a story set in the late eighteenth to mid nineteenth centuries it would be authentic, at any other period it would be anachronistic at best. [My personal opinion, but I'm English, know Brum, and FWIW I am a professional linguist].

Speaker

Thanks for all the feedback

Iolanthe Portmanteaux's picture

It was very useful. I also got a few private messages that were helpful.

In the end, I've decided to find a different word. Brummagem, just as a word, brings so much with it that I'd rather find something simpler.

Thanks to all! (And Speaker, I quite appreciated your remarks.)

- io

Bru-mmagen

The matter has been closed by Io but...
How could a word beginning with Bru ever be offensive?

Bru

do you mean

Maddy Bell's picture

bruising?

Its not a very common letter grouping, the only other common usage words I can think of off the top of my head (I'm not checking dictionaries) are brush, brute and brunt so maybe bru as a combination does have negative language vibes!


image7.1.jpg    

Madeline Anafrid Bell

Oh well, another delusion destroyed

Of course you could also add brucelliosis, brucine, brusque, brutify
not to mention the most horrible word imaginable for many Englishmen: Brussels

Brussels?

Daphne Xu's picture

Brussels for Englishmen? Children, yes, in the form of Brussels sprouts. And they have no idea it refers to a small country.

-- Daphne Xu

Personally I like Brussels

Both the sprouts and the city. I worked there for a short time.
Then there's "Brussels" where my view is more nuanced but mostly positive.

Starting with Bru...

Iolanthe Portmanteaux's picture

"Closed by Io" -- yes, I got my question answered, but I'm open to and happy at the antics that followed!

- io