http://archive.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2011/03/13/the_jimmies_story/ For @grebes_bakery THE WORD The jimmies story Can an ice cream topping be racist? By Jan Freeman March 13, 2011 When I mentioned jimmies, the long-established localism for chocolate sprinkles, in a recent column, it was just as a passing example; I didn’t mean to reopen an etymological can of worms. But a few days later, along came an e-mail from Ron Slate of Milton, repeating the rumor that has dogged our candy terminology. “My mother told us never to use the word ‘jimmies’ because it is an epithet for African-Americans,” he wrote. “So we always said ‘sprinkles.’ ” Even before that tale got abroad, jimmies was trailing clouds of factoid & fancy. Its origins are murky, so — like “the whole nine yards” & the real McCoy” — it attracts just-so stories, some plausible & some less so. At the “Boston English” section of the website UniversalHub, commenters will tell you that jimmies are named for the Jimmy Fund, the children’s cancer charity; for a kid named Jimmy who got them on his ice cream as a birthday treat (“they’re Jimmy’s”); for a mayor named Jim Conelson, or a Jimmy O’Connell who was extra generous with sprinkles; & for a guy who (maybe) ran the chocolate-sprinkles machine at the @JustBorn candy factory. Of all these theories, only the last is even remotely plausible. #JustBorn, the candy company that still provides us w/our marshmallow Peeps & Mike & Ikes, was founded in Brooklyn in 1923, according to its official history, thu patriarch #SamBorn had already come up w/candy innovations like a machine to put sticks into lollipops. The company’s website claims that “jimmies, the chocolate grains sprinkled on ice cream, were invented at Just Born, & named after the employee who made them.” (Company spokesmen have mentioned a #JimmyBartholomew, but his existence is unverified.) But company histories often include a fudge factor, & this claim of invention seems dubious: Chocolate sprinkles, so called, were already popular in the 1920s, the newspaper archives show. The Nashua, NH Telegraph is advertising a treat made w/ chocolate sprinkles in 1921, ... Contd ...go to url https://www.instagram.com/p/CIBU-bynS1T/?igshid=reo5dufmig3w
