Mind your language
'Let your little tike show off their little trike with this trendy shirt', read an advertisement for toddlers' T-shirts that Veronica showed me.
In British English, tyke means 'bitch, cur' or `Yorkshireman'. In American English it is often used innocently enough for 'child'. But it was the slogan on the advertised T-shirts that struck me: PIMP MY RIDE. It sounded pretty rude to me, with unplumbed sexual connotations. Not suitable for toddlers.
But Veronica explained that there is a popular programme on the MTV channel that goes by this name. It is all about tarting up cars. A trailer for Pimp My Ride says, 'Once again, rap superstar and car enthusiast Xzibit and car customisation specialist Mad Mike take aim on the biggest clunkers on the road.' It is worth noting that the stage name of the rap superstar (born Alvin Nathaniel Joiner) is pronounced not Exzedibit, but in the American way Ex-zee-bit. Actually he seems to have an otiose `i' in Xzibit, but let us not quibble.
The phrasepimp my is now being used in all sorts of variants: pimp my doll, laptop, snowman, dog or font (this being the type-font or fount, not the baptismal kind). MTV has had recourse to lawyers to prevent rival commercial use of 'Pimp My', as in Pimp My Snack, a website that has now changed its name to Pimp That Snack. It shares ideas on making outsized sweets, or adding 'Ming' to snacks. It carries what Veronica calls 'gross' recipes for things such as a 51b, 10,000-calorie clone of a Cadbury Creme Egg.
Pimp is a good old Jacobean word, used by Ben Jonson and Middleton. It means 'a pander'. Its origin is unknown. There is a suggestion that it comes from Mediaeval French pinpant, 'seductive in outward appearance'. This fits better the current MTV meaning of the word than the intervening centuries of pandering.
I think that the MTV denotation has developed either from an American meaning, 'male prostitute', used in the past six decades, or from one aspect of the usage of the verb that has emerged only in the past two decades. The Oxford English Dictionary has gleaned one quotation from 1992: 'He's pimping himself here, knowing he needs the publicity but hating himself for playing the game,' and another from a satirical novel by a Canadian, Will Ferguson, called Happiness (2002): 'We have to get Soiree out there, pimping his book.' It is easy to see how acting as a pimp to oneself or a product would entail, as I found myself saying earlier, tarting it up.
Dot Wordsworth
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