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While many of us like our ice cream unadorned, some could not properly enjoy a cone of their favorite flavor without its first being dipped into or sprinkled with jimmies, a colored candy decoration commonly used on ice cream, cupcakes, and donuts. However, as the example above illustrates, for some it's a guilty pleasure because they've been told their preferred name for the multi-hued sweet sprinklings packs a racist wallop: The Dictionary of American Regional English defines jimmies as tiny balls or rod-shaped bits of candy used as a topping for ice-cream, cakes and other sweets. This confection goes by many names, including 'sprinkles', 'nonpareils,' and 'hundreds and thousands,' but even among those who refer to them as 'jimmies' there is contention — some say all colors of this topping are properly styled 'jimmies,' while others assert only the brown ones are called that, with other shades of the sweet stuff being termed 'sprinkles.' There are two theories as to why anyone might think there's a racist connotation to the name: One focuses on the brown color of what some say are the only true jimmies; the other posits that the name is a reference to Jim Crow, the title character in a well-known minstrel song of the 1830s. (Jim Crow quickly became a slang term for anything having to do with African-Americans, particularly items of a racist bent, such as the Jim Crow laws that segregated blacks from whites in the South.) No valid reason exists to suppose that 'jimmies' carries a racist meaning or had a racially-charged origin. However, it's difficult to definitively disprove the claim because the term's entry into the English language is downright murky. The theory cited most often attributes the naming of the confection to the Just Born company, a candymaking operation founded in Brooklyn in 1923 who now produce such popular treats as 'Peeps' and 'Mike and Ike.' Just Born have long maintained that not only did they come up with the name jimmies, but they invented the product (i.e., chocolate sprinkles) as well: The notion that Just Born invented chocolate sprinkles is specious, however, as newspaper references to chocolate sprinkles antedate the founding of the company: But even if Just Born didn't invent chocolate sprinkles, could they at least have been the source that first called them jimmies? Beth Kimmerle, author of Candy: The Sweet History, ventured the opinion that Just Born created the term jimmies as a way of branding an extant product as their own: Some sources identify the Just Born employee for whom jimmies were supposedly named as Jimmy Bartholomew, a fellow who began working for Just Born in 1930 and manned the machine that made the confection. However, that too may be myth, as Just Born co-CEO Ross Born couldn't positively confirm Jimmy's surname. Also, certain respected slang dictionaries (such as Cassell's Dictionary of Slang and Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang) trace jimmies to the 1920s, which would place the naming of the item prior to the purported machine operator's stint with Just Born in 1930. As to how else the term could have entered the language, another theory suggests it as a short form of the venerable English slang word jim-jam. While jim-jam has a number of meanings, one that's been around since the 16th century is a trivial article or knick-knack. By the lights of the jim-jam theory, the trivial aspect of that one particular meaning translated to the confection now called jimmies. However, that theory has a number of holes in it. First, according to the Oxford English Dictionary (which is the bible of word histories for the English language), the only meanings common to both jim-jam and jimmies have to do with delirium tremens and the heebie-jeebies — the trivial meaning of jim-jam does not seem to have moved over to jimmies. Second, at no point have the candy sprinkles been called jim-jams, a link in the etymological chain one would expect if the one were a shortening of the other. Throwing yet another log on the fire, a 1993 Boston Globe item stated that The origin of the name is apparently unknown, but we found this hard-to-take-too-seriously reference in an old file: An (unnamed) ice cream maker claims that in 1901 Constance Bartlett of Pottstown, Pennsylvania, after grating chocolate over ice cream for her son's birthday, reportedly told other children they couldn't eat them because 'they're Jimmy's.' Sometimes words just sneak into a language without anyone's knowing, years after the fact, how that process came about. Yet no matter how jimmies became part of common parlance (as with many other terms, its origin may ultimately prove untraceable), no substantive evidence demonstrates anything denigrative of African-Americans was tied to the origin of the name: It may be the case that among those who refer to dark brown or chocolate sprinkles as jimmies and other colors simply as sprinkles, someone simply assumed a potentially racist connection was at work and retroactively invented an explanation for it.
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