Monday, 9 June 2014

JUMBO----JUMBO JET....JUMBO ICE-CREAM....WHAT'S IN THIS WORD......WHAT'S THE HISTORY BEHIND THIS WORD........READ ON.......

By Ranjana S.


Ranging from a jumbo jet to a jumbo ice-cream, the informal term jumbo in recent times is used to express anything uncharacteristically mammoth in size. The word drew its inception in English,as a name to refer to an elephant in the same way that Polly refers to a parrot.

The original Jumbo was a mammoth African elephant, popular with kids, that was caged in a London zoo a century ago, and then was shipped to America by the renowned circus-owner and showman Phineas T.Barnum.

The question arises, why was “Jumbo the elephant" called Jumbo in the first place? This will be difficult to answer. He was transported to England at the age of four from the zoo in Paris, bartering a rhinoceros. He was born in the wilderness of Africa rather than in the captivity in France. However, where was he christened "Jumbo"....in Africa, France, or England?

According to a recent biography of Jumbo, he was named by the superintendent of the London zoo, Abraham Deo Barlett: the theory says he simply took the second element of the African term Mumbo-Jumbo-the first element, Mumbo, he gave as a name to a gorilla in the zoo.


In English Mumbo-Jumbo refers to "nonsense", or an irrelevant and incomprehensible explanations, drawing on senses related to African pagan religion, referred to witchdoctors, or an idol. The jumbo-elephant may have come from a West African word for a "God" or a "spirit", nzambi or zumbi, also the origin of the word zombie.

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