Good Words: "Bling"

Though I don’t find myself using it much, I’ve long admired how “bling” oddly seems so perfectly appropriate for the kind of over-the-top jewelry we see not only on hip hop artists and athletes, but on anyone whose jewelry seems a little ostentatious or somehow out of place. I was at a party recently -- okay, about a hundred years ago -- kind of a casual backyard sort of thing, but one guy had a bracelet of what looked to be jawbreaker-sized gold nuggets going around his wrist. When he raised that arm to greet a friend just arriving, that friend yelled back, “Ricky! Man, careful with that serious blingage before the sun reflecting from it blinds us all!” Many of us laughed, not just because of the perfect, if perfectly ironic, use of slang, but also because, at least for me anyway, “bling” has a cartoonish quality that fits the visual nature of what it describes. So “bling,” in an odd way, sounds like what it describes. It’s not onomatopoeia, but it feels like it. Is that because for many years the word “bling” was often placed next to fancy jewelry in comic strips? It describes that kind of ornamentation that says something about the wearer’s immodesty or pride or maybe just Ricky’s need to wear a gift given him by, who knows, maybe his wife who was there with him. Whatever it is, the jewelry seems to pop out at us: BLING!!!!