Birminghamize

English

Alternative forms

• Birminghamise (non-Oxford British spelling)

Etymology

Attested since 1856, from Birmingham +‎ -ize. From the English city being known for cheap knock-off goods. Coined by Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Pronunciation

• (Received Pronunciation) IPA^(key): /ˈbɜː.mɪŋ.əmaɪz/

  (General American) IPA^(key): /ˈbɝ.mɪŋ.əmaɪz/

Verb

Birminghamize (third-person singular simple present Birminghamizes, present participle Birminghamizing, simple past and past participle Birminghamized)

1. (transitive) To make ersatz [1856]
   • 1856, Ralph Waldo Emerson, English Traits, ch. Ⅴ – "Ability".

     “The manners and customs of society are artificial;—made-up men with made-up manners;—and thus the whole is Birminghamized, and we have a nation whose existence is a work of art;—a cold, barren, almost arctic isle being made the most fruitful, luxurious and imperial land in the whole earth.”

   • [1972, Milton Ridvas Konvitz, The recognition of Ralph Waldo Emerson: selected criticism since 1837, University of Michigan Press, →ISBN, →LCCN, page 160:

     He has a relish for unfamiliar words, words of recent coinage or of his own make, or that closely similar type of words to which age has brought a second childhood... After this “Birminhamize” will be a mere peccadillo...]

   • 1986, Michael W. Doyle, Empires, Cornell University Press, →ISBN, page 292:

     “Full Home Rule, first through a powerful system of local government (Chamberlain’s proposal to "Birminghamize" Ireland), later through a wider, national self-government, inexorably became the only Liberal solution.”

   • [2002, Rachel Crawford, Poetry, enclosure, and the vernacular landscape, 1700–1830, Cambridge University Press, →ISBN, →LCCN, page 160:

     The colloquial form of the city’s name thus entered the language as a contemptuous epithet. In 1861 the word was used to describe “The vulgar dandy, strutting along, with his Brummajem jewellry”; to “Birminhamize” was “to artificialize.”]

   • [Fall 2010, Deidre Shauna Lynch, “"Young ladies are delicate plants": Jane Austen and Greenhouse Romanticism”, in ELH‎^[1], volume 77, number 3, Johns Hopkins University Press:

     The horticultural site where some ladies naturalize is here revealed as a site where, simultaneously, others birminghamize—a nineteenth-century synonym, the OED states, for "artificialize."]

   • [2010, Rhys Richards, “Ceramic Imitation Arm Rings for Indigenous Trade in the Solomon Islands 1880 to 1920”, in Records of the Auckland Museum, volume 47, Auckland War Memorial Museum, →JSTOR, page 106:

     In the 19th Century, the word Birmingham was used to mean artificial (the associated verb was birminghamize).]

   • [2020-12-17, Aurélie Héois, “When Proper Names Become Verbs: A Semantic Perspective”, in Lexis, →DOI, retrieved 2024-10-02:

     Indeed, the comparison of Manchesterize and Birminghamize showed that, from a semantic point of view, there are no differences in the relationship between the verb and the PN etymon even though the former is listed as deriving from a common noun, itself originating from a PN.]

See also

• brummagem