Out of curiosity I tuned into Queer Eye for the Straight Guy several weeks ago and, after acclimating myself to its occasional shrill earnestness, have become quite fond of the Fab 5 and their talent for transforming (i.e., adding a bit of class and polish to) straight men.
One word I especially like, that Carson uses frequently, is zhuzhing, which is defined by Blanche Poubelle:
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.”
Its appeal is summed up nicely:
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….
*With a nod to Austin’s own, The Fabulous Thunderbirds’ rockin’ song Wrap It Up.