Comments on: What do patrons know about Wikipedia?

By: ellie

ellie — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 23:35:02 +0000

I grew up outside of Philly and had only ever heard of jimmies until after undergrad when I tried to order jimmies in Los Angeles and got a blank stare. I didn’t even know to call them sprinkles, I had to point. Now when I go home I pick up a bag of jimmies from the pre-packaged bulk section of my local supermarket just to show people who have never heard the word jimmies.

By: Gar

Gar — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 18:48:14 +0000

Check this out:

CAS decides to work with the Wikipedia community to improve their use of CAS Registry Numbers:

http://www.cas.org/newsevents/caswikipedia.html

By: Emily

Emily — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 18:13:48 +0000

You know, that’s a really good point. I think I usually assume that everyone knows Wikipedia can be edited by anyone. It’s in the news enough, right? Common knowledge.

But now that I think about it, I seem to spend a lot of time explaining to folks what a wiki is… And if people don’t know that, then knowing that it’s editable by anyone isn’t necessarily something they’d know. It’s good to challenge those simple assumptions sometimes.

BTW, it’s totally “sprinkles.”

By: abby

abby — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 16:18:36 +0000

Found your blog when looking for info about dustjackets. Just a quick thing-first Jimmies have a racist connotation—Jimmie comes from Jim Crow, as in the Jim Crow laws. That being said in Massachusetts my home state it’s jimmies not sprinkles.

By: Nicole

Nicole — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 15:04:39 +0000

Owen, that is so cool

By: Owen

Owen — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 14:58:56 +0000

We need a new map: http://www.popvssoda.com

By: Nicole

Nicole — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 14:54:55 +0000

Now - I must add a note to my mother’s comment - I did teach her how to use search engines - but I also tell her to check with libraries and librarians in addition to Google - don’t go giving me a bad name among librarians hehe

By: Cheryl

Cheryl — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 14:47:17 +0000

OK, “Computer Geeks” Mom speaking again….
Congratulations to my daughter (brillant as always).
By googling (learned this from her), I found the concrete answer!! ENJOY…..

Thanks to The Capital Times, I now know the difference between sprinkles and jimmies. The difference is there is no difference. Both are the little bits of candy-coated chocolate that liven up your ice cream. The real distinction seems to be one of place. As a New Yorker I call them sprinkles. Folks in Philadelphia, Boston, Michigan and Wisconsin call them jimmies.

But where does the word jimmies itself come from? As with many food origins, there’s a fanciful story. In the 1930s the Just Born candy company manufactured sprinkles. Seems a guy named Jimmy ran the the company’s sprinkle-making machine and the name stuck.

The article also goes on to detail how sprinkles are made as well as foreign variations. It even suggests some really novel uses for sprinkles. All I can say is cream cheese and rainbow sprinkles on a bagel is one combination this New Yorker isn’t trying. And nobody’s gonna fool me by calling them jimmies either.

By: Nicole

Nicole — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 14:40:42 +0000

LOL - Owen, I personally think it’s a matter of where you grew up. I called them “sprinkles” and grew up in northern New Jersey, but when we moved to southern New Jersey they were called “jimmies” - who knows what the right answer is!!

By: Owen

Owen — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 13:18:46 +0000

And you’re just going to leave us in the dark about the whole “sprinkles vs. jimmies” debate? Librarians! They won’t just tell you the answer, they wanna make you go look for it…