Here I go again. [audio clip from Lynn Crymble]

I mean here I go again including a word that I might not get away with calling a common word.

I’d actually never heard of the word zaftig until I was looking for words for my book on words to do with the body.  There are a shortage of body words that start with Z.

In case you don’t know what zaftig means, as I didn’t, the most recent citation for zaftig in the Oxford English Dictionary calls Dolly Parton zaftig. Merriam-Webster defines zaftig as

“having a full rounded figure: pleasingly plump.”

Now I don’t know if Dolly Parton is exactly plump, but she certainly has a full, rounded figure.

The OED’s definition is “of a woman: plump, curvaceous, sexy.”

The word appeared first in print in a book from 1937 called The Old Bunch by Meyer Levin.  From the review in Time Magazine I can see not only that it sold for three dollars at the time and was a 964 page novel set in Chicago, but that it was reported to have contained “twice as many four-letter unprintables as [its] nearest competitor.”

The reviewer also warns readers that they may find themselves “oppressed at times by the heavy, strident Jewishness of the book’s atmosphere.”

That sort of explains why it was the first to out our word zaftig.

Zaftig is a word that came into English from Yiddish.

Yiddish is a bit of an unusual language.  It developed starting about 1000 years ago among Jews in what is now Germany.  It is based on Germanic but with generous dollops of Hebrew and other languages thrown in.  It’s written using Hebrew characters.  It developed in Jewish enclaves existing inside but largely separately from other European societies.

As reported by the OED there are only about 200 English words that have come to us from Yiddish; glitzy, schmooze, chutzpa and klutz are a few.

The parent of zaftig is ultimately Germanic therefore.

That parent was saftig meaning “juicy.” So there was certainly an attractive playfulness behind calling someone zaftig.

When Lynn asked me to do this word I’d already looked it up when researching my book and so the “juicy” meaning jumped to mind.  I playfully told her she was kind of zaftig herself.

I hope she didn’t think I was calling her plump.

This episode brought to you by my book on the words we use for our bodies: Carnal Knowledge - A Navel Gazer’s Dictionary of Anatomy, Etymology, and Trivia available at bookstores or online. For more information please visit www.navelgazersdictionary.com