by Kevin Burton
Last month on Page 7 we looked at words such as several and handful that defy exact definition. Here’s another: Jiffy.
How long is a jiffy?
Merriam-Webster says a jiffy is “a very short period of time: moment, instant.” The Cambridge dictionary lists synonyms “flash, heartbeat, instant, split second.”
But there is a more exact definition, in fact, more than one definition, according to interestingfacts.com.
“You’ve probably heard people say things like ‘I’ll be there in a jiffy’ using jiffy to mean a very short period of time, something like the blink of an eye,” the website reads.” But it may surprise you to learn that for some scientists, the term has a more precise definition.”
“That definition varies, depending on who is doing the talking.”
“The physical chemist Gilbert Newton Lewis (1875-1946) defined a jiffy as the length of time it takes for light to travel one centimeter in a vacuum. However some physicists have defined a jiffy as the time it takes for light to travel one femtometer – one millionth of a millionth of a millimeter.”
“By this account each second contains roughly three hundred thousand billion, billion jiffys.”
But wait, there’s more!
“A jiffy has also been defined outside of physics and chemistry. An electrical engineer for example, might describe a jiffy as the time it takes for a single cycle of alternating current, which is one fiftieth or one sixtieth of a second, depending on the electrical system.”
“Whatever definition holds true, one thing is certain – no one in the history of the world has ever truly accomplished much “in a jiffy,” the website reads.
Well that last is debatable. How about “then I saw her face, now I’m a believer!” That sounds like a true love jiffy, one of millions mentioned in popular song.
But my real point is, those scientific definitions leave me cold. My mancave may have several characteristics of a laboratory, but it isn’t one. I’d like to preserve jiffy for the everyman, keep it as something you can sink your lexicographic teeth into, like popcorn.
Remember Jiffy Pop? It’s actually still around, but I don’t hear so much about it anymore. I remember the fun of making it and I remember the boy on the TV commercial whose eyes got bigger as the popcorn package got bigger on the stove. Fun stuff. But the history of the product is less fun, bogged down into court cases, according to Wikipedia.
“Frederick C. Mennen of LaPorte, Indiana, a chemist, inventor and industrialist, is credited with developing the product in 1958. Mennen began marketing Jiffy Pop in 1959.
“American Home Products purchased Jiffy Pop from Mennen that same year. There, Alvin Golub, a pharmacologist, perfected the product and within one year it reached the national U.S. market. In 1976, the stage magician Harry Blackstone Jr. was endorsing what the television-commercial jingle called ‘the magic treat — as much fun to make as it is to eat.’”
“Jiffy Pop was based on a similar product designed five years before by Benjamin Coleman of Berkley, Michigan, and marketed by the Taylor-Reed Corporation as E-Z Pop. In the early 1960s, Taylor-Reed sued Mennen Food Products for patent infringement. The district court ruled for the plaintiff, finding Jiffy Pop and E-Z Pop equivalent products, but the case was overturned on appeal.”
ConAgra now owns the Jiffy Pop brand. But nobody and no definition seems to own the term jiffy. It seems like a flexible, Swiss army knife kind of word.
For instance, I can define jiffy as “the time it takes to recognize the smell of bacon” or “the time it takes me to exit the room when my wife mentions cleaning the gutters.”
How about “the time it takes money to evaporate” or “the time it takes the cat to locate and consume food that I have dropped.”
Ah that jiffy, so elusive. But you know it when you see it in the real world.
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