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Queer Eye for the Straight Guy has made quite a splash on the Bravo cable network this year. For those readers unfamiliar with the show, it involves the Fab 5-- five gay men who are experts in fashion, hair, design, food, and culture-- who do a make-over of a slobbish straight man in each episode.

The Fab 5 have certainly contributed to promoting gay New York style around the country, but they've also introduced many of us to a new word-- zhuzh. Kyan, the hair stylist, is the fondest of the word, and for him it seems to mean something like 'arrange your hair in a way that looks stylishly messy'. Zhuzhing is done after applying a product (which the manufacturers have no doubt paid to have placed in the episode). Blanche thought for a while that zhuzhing was specific to hair styling, but then she heard Carson, the fashionista, apply it to a particular way of rolling up shirt sleeves to give them a similarly fashionably messy look.

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What is this word zhuzh? First the pronunciation. The zh is like the sound at the beginning of Zsa-Zsa or at the end of beige, and the vowel in this word is the same vowel found in an English word like put. The handful of Internet citations that Miss Poubelle could locate spell the word as either zhuzh or zhoozh. Blanche prefers the former spelling, since the oo of zhoozh gives the false impression that the word rhymes with rouge.

Zhuzh is primarily a verb in the Queer Eye episodes, and is often used in combination with up, as in "to zhuzh your sleeves up." The word has spread beyond Queer Eye and seems generally to mean 'make fashionable'. When applied to the general project of making everything stylish, it sometimes takes the object it, as in "zhuzhing it up for some special occasion."

Although the verbal use is predominant now, Miss Poubelle was intrigued to find that in some older citations, zhuzh is actually an adjective, meaning something like 'fashionable'. The oldest instance she could locate is from a 1997 article in a South African newspaper story about a Hooker's Ball in Cape Town. Readers were urged to "book tickets to this zhoozh affair." It's easy to see how the word might make the transition from adjective to verb.

Where does it come from? That is indeed a mystery. In the Australian paper The Sun Herald, columnist David Dale suggested that zhuzh is onomatopoeic for the sound that hair gel makes when it's being applied. This is an ingenious suggestion, but doesn't seem to jibe with the earliest uses, where it is applied to things like fancy dress balls. A reader replied to Dale's column arguing instead that zhuzhy is somehow related to bourgeois. There is a short form of bourgeois, pronounced buzhy (or boozhy?), but in Miss Poubelle's experience buzhy is typically a derogatory term, applied to (upper) middle-class decor or values. It's hard to think of a Queer Eye make-over's hairdo or a Cape Town drag ball as bourgeois. The ultimate origin is still a mystery.

But Miss Poubelle guesses that one part of the bourgeois hypothesis may be correct, and that is the connection to French. Zhuzh is a very peculiar word for English. English words do not typically start with the sound zh, and the few words that we have are all borrowings, typically from French. Think of genre and je ne sais quoi. It seems that when words like this are fully assimilated into English they get the harder English j instead, as in judge or just.

To an English speaker's ear, a word with zh at the beginning sounds foreign and/or French, and English speakers associate the French with femininity and fashion. So a word like zhuzh with its two foreign-sounding zh's has a potent kind of queer aesthetics. It doesn't sound like the kind of word a 'real man' would use, and so it's particularly attractive to those who don't care about being perceived as real men.

Perhaps the ultimate appeal of zhuzh is that you can't imagine George W. Bush ever saying it, much less being able to pronounce it. With the Francophobic, macho Bush administration in power, maybe we all appreciate the diversion of Queer Eye because it celebrates the virtues of style and appearance in a political climate that has precious little of either. Now if we could only get the Fab 5 to re-do our foreign policy....