Word of the week: Plump

My big fat lexical preoccupation.

California’s lavishly telegenic governor, Gavin Newsom, had a couple of minutes in the spotlight at last week’s Democratic National Convention, when he introduced my state — aka “the great state of [House Speaker] Nancy Pelosi” — during the ceremonial roll call. He also makes frequent appearances in my email inbox, where he’s “humbly asking” me to contribute to various Democratic campaigns or “reaching out to ask” if I might cough up some dollars for Nevadans for Reproductive Freedom.

Whenever and however he shows up, I’m reminded of how Gavin Newsom first came to my attention: not as California’s 40th governor or as California’s 49th lieutenant governor or as San Francisco’s 42nd mayor, or even as the alarming Kimberly Guilfoyle’s ex-husband (what was he thinking?), but rather as an ambitious local businessman who at the age of 25, with an infusion of cash from family friend Gordon Getty (of the Gettys), opened a little wine store on San Francisco’s Fillmore Street called PlumpJack. The store is still there; its parent company, the PlumpJack Group, now comprises several wineries, four restaurants, a Lake Tahoe hotel, a sporting-apparel boutique, five event spaces, and the PlumpJack charitable foundation.

And the PlumpJack name? According to the PlumpJack Winery website, it’s a reference to “one of Shakespeare’s most unforgettable characters, Sir John ‘PlumpJack’ Falstaff. This down-to-earth, fun-loving, and irreverent character shared an unbreakable bond of loyalty with Prince Hal (Henry V) over many goblets of sack (wine) at the local tavern.”

PlumpJack cabernet sauvignon.

So Gavin Newsom -» PlumpJack -» plump, and thence to the wide world of plumpness.

Other literary plumps

Falstaff isn’t the only character known for his plumpness. There’s “stately, plump Buck Mulligan,” of course, who in the first sentence of James Joyce’s Ulysses comes “from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.”

Then there’s Dolly Varden, the “gaily dressed coquette” in Charles Dickens’s Barnaby Rudge¹ .

A Currier & Ives illustration of Dolly Varden.

Here’s how Dickens describes Dolly in Chapter 41:

How well she looked? Well? Why, if he had exhausted every laudatory adjective in the dictionary, it wouldn’t have been praise enough. When and where was there ever such a plump, roguish, comely, bright-eyed, enticing, bewitching, captivating, maddening little puss in all this world, as Dolly!

Dolly was one of the most popular fictional characters of the mid-19th century, when plumpness was fashionable and a sign of robust health. She was the source of countless commercial tributes. “Suddenly,” writes Emily McCort for the Maryland Center for History and Culture, “anything and everything was named after her, including various types of music, a fish (the Dolly Varden Trout, specifically), a hat, and a style of dress. Godey’s Lady’s Book, an American magazine that featured news on the latest fashions, shared in a publication that ‘A “DOLLY VARDEN Cough Elixir” is announced, Dolly Varden horseshoe, Dolly Varden dog collar, Dolly Varden razor strops, and, running the thing in the ground, are Dolly Varden metallic coffins.’ There was even a small political party and an all African-American, all-female baseball team named after her.”

Here’s a more complete list of Dolly Varden eponyms. The “small political party” was in California; the the name of the Dolly Varden trout — which also originated in California — was inspired not by Dolly’s plumpness but by her colorful attire.

Dolly Varden trout (Salvelinus malma)

Plump roots

The earliest uses of plump in English literature are for the verb form meaning “to land with a splash or a thud; to plunge into water.” The OED says the word — which has cognates in other Germanic languages, such as Dutch plompen — is “ultimately imitative” of the sound something makes when landing in water.² But you can also “plump down” in a chair.

Eventually plump evolved to mean “doing something directly.” If you plump for an option, or a candidate, you express a preference.

As for the adjective plump, it probably came from Dutch plomp (which apparently is not exactly the same as plompen?); it meant “blunt, dull, rude, coarse, unrefined” in both Dutch and English until around the middle of the 16th century, when it took on its contemporary meaning of “filled out” or “chubby.” There may have been some influence from plum, a fruit that’s most appetizing when it’s full and round (and whose name comes to us not from Dutch, for a change, but from Latin prunum).

Plump can also be a collective noun for a group of animals such as seals or ducks, which is quite adorable.

“A Plump of Seals,” by Perkins & Morley

Cosmetic plumping

Corporeal plumpness is not as popular today as it was in previous centuries, but selective facial plumpness is a selling feature of many cosmetic products. I found 866 live trademarks for PLUMP in the USPTO, including PLUMP UP (a peptide facial serum), PLUMP & JUICY (a spray-on serum and “lip booster”), DUCK PLUMP (“Caution! May cause duck lips!”), PRISMATIC PLUMP (lip gloss), REPLUMPING SERUM (“haircare inspired by skincare”), VISIPLUMP (more lip stuff), and the overstuffed SEXY MOTHER PLUCKER PILLOW PLUMP XXL PLUMPING GLOSS (lips again). Sometime plump is a verb, as in PLUMP YOUR PUCKER (yet another lip gloss).

I like to dream that one of these brands will dump plump in favor of reviving the Dolly Varden name, just for fun.

A handful of the many, many cosmetic products with PLUMP in their names.

If cosmetics prove inadequate, hie thee to a paramedical practice in New York and Miami called simply PLUMP (website: getplump dot com). It offers Botox, fillers, microneedling, and other under-the-skin treatments.

Plump on the menu

“Plumping” is a food-tech term: It’s “the process by which some poultry companies inject raw chicken meat with saltwater, chicken stock, seaweed extract, or some combination thereof,” according to Wikipedia. There’s a Minnesota-based chicken brand called GOLD’N PLUMP whose marketing leads you to believe the plumping comes naturally: “Gold’n Plump chickens are raised with care by family farmers in Minnesota. Our chickens are raised simply and naturally with no antibiotics ever, no added hormones and fed a vegetable and grain diet.”

Then there’s PLUMPY’NUT, a peanut-based paste invented in 1996 for use in the treatment of acute malnutrition. Although the product originated in France, the name is a pleasing portmanteau of the English words “plump” and “peanut.”

And speaking of pleasing, let’s go out with NYO Jazz’s rendition of Quincy Jones “Pleasingly Plump.” The song is an instrumental; if there’s a meaning to the title other than Jones’s own bodily preferences, I haven’t found it.

1. Which I regret to say I’ve never read.

2. The similarity of plump to other -ump verbs like bump, dump, thump, lump, chump, and, yes, trump is probably no accident. But the resemblance of plump to Latin plumbāre (to weight with lead — compare plumb) is “no more than coincidental,” the OED tells us.