chintzy

adjective

- decorated with, or as if with, chintz; gaudy, cheap; stingy

- cheap and of poor quality

- cheaply made and showing a lack of taste

- suburban, unfashionable, petit-bourgeois; mean, stingy

- gaudy or trashy; also miserly

Merriam-Webster, Cambridge Dictionary, Collins Dictionary, Oxford English Dictionary, American Heritage Dictionary

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WORD ORIGIN

The origin from Sanskrit chitra — "bright, variegated, spotted" — changed into Hindi chīnt, the name for India's glazed, hand-printed cottons. English traders adopted it as chint in the early 1600s; because the cloth was sold in quantity, the plural chints became the standard form, and by the late 1700s it had mysteriously re-spelled itself chintz — possibly, by analogy with quartz.

The adjective is younger and has negative associations. By 1851, Manchester mills had flooded the market with cheap machine-printed imitations.

BTW, the word “cheetah” comes from the same Sanskrit root — it means the "spotted one."

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YESTERDAY’S LUXURY

In 1721 the British Parliament made it illegal to wear chintz.


Odd, for a word that now means cheap. But the ban was aimed at a luxury. Indian chintz — glazed cotton with hand-printed flowers that kept their colour through washing — was so popular that English wool and silk weavers couldn't compete, and lobbied to have printed cottons outlawed. People smuggled it and wore it anyway.


Once the ban lifted, Lancashire's mills copied the fabric cheaply and the price collapsed. In 1851 George Eliot, writing to her half-sister about a muslin sample,in a letter from the novelist George Eliot to her half-sister Fanny, rejecting a spotted muslin because its effect struck her as "chintzy and unbecoming".

German did the same in the other direction with the word Kitsch, which the slang of Munich art dealers gave to English.

In 1996 IKEA told British customers to "chuck out your chintz". Now, interior magazines are celebrating the fabric's return — and insisting it's no longer chintzy. 



On the other side of the Atlantic, American English gave the word a second meaning: penny-pinching. Your US colleague who calls the travel budget chintzy isn't talking about curtains.


So: chintzy fits anything that tries to look richer than it is.

Helga & Paul Smith

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SYNONYMS

brash, cheap, cheesy, CHINTZY, cut-rate, flashy, garish, gaudy, gimcrack, glitzy, inferior, kitschy, loud, low-end, low-grade, meretricious, poor-quality, shabby, showy, slapdash, tacky, tasteless, tawdry, tinny, trashy, vulgar

(a person, chiefly North American) cheap, CHINTZY, mean, miserly, parsimonious, penny-pinching, stingy, tightfisted



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SMUGGLE OWAD into a conversation today, say something like:

“Fashion magazines are shifting the association of CHINTZY into something positive and desirable.”

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