Birminghamize

present singular third person Birminghamizes · participle present Birminghamizing · participle past Birminghamized · past Birminghamized · alternative Birminghamise

1. datedtransitiveTo make ersatz .First known use 1856

   In the 19th Century, the word Birmingham was used to mean artificial (the associated verb was birminghamize).

   [2010, Rhys Richards, “Ceramic Imitation Arm Rings for Indigenous Trade in the Solomon Islands 1880 to 1920”, in Records of the Auckland Museum, volume 47, Auckland War Memorial Museum, →JSTOR, page 106

   5 more examples

   1856, Ralph Waldo Emerson, English Traits, ch. Ⅴ – "Ability". “The manners and customs of society are artificial;—made-up men with made-up manners;—and thus the whole is Birminghamized, and we have a nation whose existence is a work of art;—a cold, barren, almost arctic isle being made the most fruitful, luxurious and imperial land in the whole earth.”

   He has a relish for unfamiliar words, words of recent coinage or of his own make, or that closely similar type of words to which age has brought a second childhood... After this “Birminhamize” will be a mere peccadillo...

   [1972, Milton Ridvas Konvitz, The recognition of Ralph Waldo Emerson: selected criticism since 1837, University of Michigan Press, →ISBN, →LCCN, page 160

   “Full Home Rule, first through a powerful system of local government (Chamberlain’s proposal to "Birminghamize" Ireland), later through a wider, national self-government, inexorably became the only Liberal solution.”

   1986, Michael W. Doyle, Empires, Cornell University Press, →ISBN, page 292

   The colloquial form of the city’s name thus entered the language as a contemptuous epithet. In 1861 the word was used to describe “The vulgar dandy, strutting along, with his Brummajem jewellry”; to “Birminhamize” was “to artificialize.”

   [2002, Rachel Crawford, Poetry, enclosure, and the vernacular landscape, 1700–1830, Cambridge University Press, →ISBN, →LCCN, page 160

   The horticultural site where some ladies naturalize is here revealed as a site where, simultaneously, others birminghamize—a nineteenth-century synonym, the OED states, for "artificialize."

   [Fall 2010, Deidre Shauna Lynch, “"Young ladies are delicate plants": Jane Austen and Greenhouse Romanticism”, in ELH, volume 77, number 3, Johns Hopkins University Press