Jumbo
(pronounced juhm-boh)
(1) An informal descriptor for a very large
person, animal, or thing, applied especially to an unusually large version of
something usually smaller.
(2) In commerce, a term (sometimes interpolated into
a brand) used to suggest a large version of something.
(3) A general term for wide-bodied passenger
airplanes although historically most associated with the Boeing 747 (1969).
(4) In (mostly in the US) nautical use, a
forestaysail having a boom (jumbo boom) along its foot, used especially on schooners;
a sail used in place of a course on a square-rigged ship, having the form of an
isosceles triangle set apex downward.
(5) In engineering & mining, as drilling
jumbo, a platform-mounted machine used to drill rock.
(6) As mumbo-jumbo, a historic term used of paganism,
originally referring to deities or other supernatural beings worshipped some West
African peoples (usually in the form of an idol representing such a being). It
was later adopted to describe any speech which was either technical jargon
understood only by specialists or anything genuinely meaningless or incomprehensible.
1800–1810: Of uncertain origin but there is
evidence the first use of the word by English-speakers was as an imperfect
echoic of what was heard by European explorers or colonists in Africa. It entered popular use after Jumbo, an East
African elephant (1860-1885) was in 1882 exhibited by PT Barnum (1810-1891) of
the Ringling Brothers & Barnum & Bailey Circus. The name may be derived from either the Swahili
jambo (matter, thing) or jumbe (chief, headman) although some
sources cite the Sanskrit जम्बु (jambū or jambul) (rose apple). Most
convincing comes from the anthropological record of west-Africa where jumbo was
used to describe a "clumsy, unwieldy fellow" (1823), itself possibly
from a word for elephant in a West African language, perhaps the Kongo nzamba.
As a modifier (formally & informally) to impart the sense of
largeness, jumbo is appended as required: jumbo jet (and jumbojet), jumbo
mortgage, jumbomania, jumbo slice, superjumbo, jumbo sandwich, jumbo cigar, jumbo
burger, jumbo cola et al. Walt Disney’s
musical cartoon Dumbo (1941)
influenced the adoption of dumbo to mean “someone not intelligent”, the use
documented by 1951 but the oral use probably pre-dates that. Jumbo is a noun & adjective, jumboization
(and jumboisation) are nouns, jumboize (and jumboise) are verbs; the noun
plural is jumbos.
PT Barnum's publicity materials were created prior to "truth in advertising" laws.
The original Jumbo (the elephant) was an exhibit in London Zoo, the institution having purchased the beast from French explorers who were said to have captured it as a calf in Abyssinia in 1861. Barnum purchased Jumbo in 1862 (much to the displeasure of the English) and immediately began in the US one of his typically extravagant advertising campaigns which emphasised both what a coup he’d achieved by wresting it from the British Empire and what an extraordinary size the creature was. His circus toured the country with Jumbo a star attraction until in September 1885 it was killed near Saint Thomas, Ontario when struck by a freight train.
Perhaps curiously, the noun mumbo-jumbo seems not
to have fallen from the linguistic treadmill, despite its origin and early colonial
associations. It entered English in
1738, based on an account of an incident in 1732 which occurred near Sami (in
modern-day Gambia). In the publications
of the time, the Mumbo Jumbo was described as a costume “idol” used by men to
frighten others and as coercive tool to regulate behaviour; it was used
especially against women to induce their submission. In hours of daylight, the costume was mounted on
a stick placed at the outskirts of the village while by night a man would dress
in it, visiting the homes of women or others deemed a problem, disputes “settled”
and punishments bestowed. Other
spellings noted in the eighteenth century include Munbo Jumbo, Numbo Jumbo and Mumbo
Chumbo and the original account ascribed the practice to Mandingo but
linguistic anthropologists have never been able to trace an obvious Mandingo
term which might be the source, the suggestions including mama dyambo (pompom-wearing ancestor) and mamagyombo (magician who exorcises troubled ancestor spirits). It may have been borrowed from another
Niger-Congo language and the European colonial transcriptions were the French moumbo-dioumbo & moumbo-ioumbo and the Portuguese mumban-jumban. On the basis of the colonial-era accounts,
the tradition (of uncertain age) must have been widespread with all settlements
in the region was said to have a Mumbo Jumbo and by the mid-nineteenth century
it had in English become a byword for a “superstitious object of senseless
worship”, evolving by the 1890s to describe any speech which was either technical
jargon understood only by specialists or anything genuinely meaningless or incomprehensible,
use presumably reinforced and encouraged by some perception of association with
“mumble”. In that sense, it somewhat
differed from the pseudo-Latin “hocus-pocus” which described words or incantations
wholly fake and intended to deceive.
Despite the history, mumbo jumbo seems still acceptable in English and
why it hasn’t yet been condemned as racist or cultural appropriation isn’t
clear.
Jambo! Lindsay Lohan in Mean Girls.
Much has changed in the twenty-first century and
it’s doubtful all of “You got your
freshmen, ROTC Guys, preps, JV jocks, Asian nerds, cool Asians, varsity jocks,
unfriendly Black hotties, girls who eat their feelings, girls who don't eat
anything, desperate wannabes, burnouts, sexually active band geeks, the
greatest people you will ever meet, and the worst. Beware of The Plastics.” would appear were
the Mean Girls (2004) script to be
written today, mere mention of ethnicity now often deconstructed as some level
of racism. Cady (the white protagonist
raised (somewhere) in Africa) uses the Swahili greeting "jambo" (from -amba (to say)
which linguistic anthropologists say was probably derived from the Proto-Bantu (there’s
a similar term in Zulu)) to introduce herself to a table of “Unfriendly Black
Hotties”. The script never makes
explicit just where in Africa Cady may have spent her youth but this, along with
another couple of cultural and linguistic clues do hint it may have been among sub-Saharan
ethnic groups although whether that was intentional isn’t documented. However, “jambo” is one of several similar
words used on the continent linked both to the later evolution in English of
jumbo and mumbo jumbo and it may be jumbo was either a direct phonetic spelling
recorded by Europeans or just a mis-heard rendition.
The prototype of first jumbojet (Boeing 747) on show on the forecourt at the Boeing’s factory in Seattle, Washington, 1968 (left), at the Paris Air Show in 1969 with a Concorde in the background (centre) and the last 747 (a freighter), also on the Boeing forecourt, November 2022.
Jumbo was a big elephant and the word was soon used
to describe large examples of other things.
In commercial use, the first use seems to have been Jumbo Cigars, sold
in 1886. The best known use in the
modern age is probably jumbo-jet (also appears jumbojet), probably first used
by Boeing engineers circa 1960 although the first documented reference is from
1964. It replaced the earlier Boeing
engineering-slang jumbo-707, probably
because a three syllable phrase is always likely to prevail over one with
seven. In the narrow technical sense,
jumbo-jet came to refer to all wide-bodied (ie multi-aisled) passenger
airplanes built since the late 1960s, but, being first, it tends most to be
associated with Boeing’s 747. Thus, when
in the early 2000s, the even larger Airbus 380 took to the skies, the term
superjumbo (and super-jumbo) was used by some, the airframe’s point of visual
differentiation from the 747 being the Boeing’s famous hump being extended along
the fuselage to the tail section, creating a double-decker. The term (which had earlier been used of the stretched
747s) however never quite caught on in the same way because the 380 was unique
and a class of superjumbos thus never emerged to demand a descriptive generic
term. As it was, economics conspired against
the A380 and the circumstances in which it flew were very different to those
envisaged in the late 1980s when first the project was conceived for not only
had advances in engineering and materials allowed a new generation of twin-jet
jumbos to operate at a much lower passenger cost per mile but airports, their
systems and physical infrastructure optimized around the 747’s capacity, proved
unwilling to make the changes needed to accommodate higher peak demand. After little more than a dozen years of
assembly, Airbus in 2021 ceased production of A380 after some 250 had been
built.
One of NASA’s Boeing 747s, adapted as a heavy-lift platform to “piggy-back” the US Space Shuttles (left). The Soviet Union (and briefly the Russians) used the one-off Antonov An-225 Мрія (Mriya (dream or inspiration)) to piggy-back its Буран (Buran (Snowstorm or Blizzard)), the USSR's space shuttle (right). The An-225, with the largest wingspan and heaviest take-off weight of any aircraft ever to enter operational service, was destroyed in the early days of the Russian invasion (the 2022 "Special Military Operation”) of Ukraine.
The 747 proved more enduring a successful and was
a machine which was truly revolutionary in its social consequences. Just as Boeing’s earlier 707 (1958) had been instrumental
in making trans-Continental air travel a viable and reliable means of transport
for a small number of people, the economics of scale made possible by the 747 meant such trips became accessible for many more.
Between 1968 and 2022, almost 1600 were built in a variety of lengths
and configurations and it was for decades the faithful workhorse of many
airlines, but it ultimately fell victim to the same financial squeeze that
doomed the A380, twin-engined aircraft able to carry almost as many passengers
at a significantly lower cost. By 2016
it was clear demand had dwindled and most of the production thereafter was for freight
operators still attracted by the 747’s unique combination of capacity,
reliability and range. As passenger 747s
progressively are retired, many will be converted to freighters, an relatively
simple operation envisaged even during the design process in the 1960s. Many flyers however noted the 747’s demise
with some regret. None denied the
advantages of airframes built from composite materials nor the enhanced economy
of the twin-engine configuration but for those who flew for hours above 30,000
feet (9000+ m), knowing one was in a metal cylinder with the redundancy of four
engines imparted great confidence.
Lindsay’s Olives in sizes to suit. Black olive martinis are a cult.
In commercial use, obvious comparative terms like “small”. “medium” & “large” are commonly used and “extra” is often appended to “small” & “large”. In the sizing of clothing, “extra” is used in multiples, labelled usually as XL XXL XXXL etc to indicate ascending graduations of large (L). With the “Extra Large”, this is on the model of the DD, DDD, FF etc bra cup descriptors used by some manufacturers although the use varies, a DD sometimes the same as an E and sometimes something between a D & E. However, at the other end of the size range, the multiple letters work the other way, an AAA cup smaller than an AA which is smaller than an A. Linguistically, that does make sense because with bras the multiple letters are synonymous with “extra”, the AA being extra small and the DD extra large. The alpha-numeric nomenclature used (30A, 32D etc) is maintained presumably because something like a "Jumbo" bra might lack sales appeal. Where manufactures want to use descriptors which indicate a larger size beyond something like extra large, they’ll trawl the alphabet, thus product packaging described as “jumbo”, “super” “mega”, colossal” “super”, “maxi” etc. Unlike S-M-L, there’s no defined ascendant order so it might be that where one manufacturer’s jumbo is larger than their mega while with some it may be the other way round.
Jumbo spark plugs. This was actually advertising the strength of the spark rather than the plug, some of the Jumbo line of plugs physically smaller than than some offered by the competition. The need for higher-performance spark plugs arose as higher octane gas (petrol) permitted compression ratios to rise.
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