Hey, everyone. No episódio de hoje, falamos sobre uma expressão do inglês que nem os nativos sabem direito como escrever! Por sorte, uma blogueira, falante nativa de inglês, teve a mesma dúvida que eu e escreveu um post que acabou esclarecendo a questão.

Transcrição

How’s it going, everyone? Today we have a new episode of the Inglesonline podcast. Please subscribe to this podcast using the Podcasts app for iPhone or iPad, or listen to the episodes using the Inglesonline Android app. To download or just listen to other episodes and download transcripts, go to inglesonline.com.br and click Podcast Inglesonline.

So here’s what went on a couple of weeks ago as I watched an English woman speak about something on some video: she used an expression  that I’d never heard before. It sounded like “joojed it up” or “joujed it up” or something like that. The woman was showing how to style her hair a certain way when she said “I haven’t ‘joujed it up’ yet”. First thing I did was google it, right? I tried a couple of different spellings but nothing interesting turned up. Since I share a house with native English speakers, naturally I turned to them for some help.

My landlady, Shaku, who’s English, said she’d never heard that expression before in her life. Weird. I then asked Kate, my Australian housemate, and that’s when my little mystery was partially solved. Kate told me that her mother uses ‘jooje it up’ all the time. To ‘jooje something up’ means to make it better, in general. Here’s another much better known English expression that has the same meaning: spruce something up. You can spruce up your bedroom by applying wallpaper to one of the walls, for example. You can spruce up your whole look by… painting your nails a nice color. Or by wearing a nice necklace. You could spruce up a simple lettuce-and-tomato salad with some mint leaves. Are you on LinkedIn, the social network for professionals? There are tons of tips offered by experts on how to spruce up your LinkedIn profile. Same thing for your profile on dating websites, if you’ve got one. So there you go: spruce something up means to make it look better, or taste better, or make it more interesting and so on. I found a web page that gives you ten different ways to spruce up an old winter coat (mainly with accessories, by the way).

Alright, now that we know what spruce something up means, let’s go back to ‘jooje it up’ – once Kate told me what it meant, I asked her how to spell the expression. You know what she told me? She said she had no idea. She said “Jooje something up is just something you say, not something you write”. Ok, I get it. It’s slang. Still, there has to be a spelling. At this point, Shaku chimed in saying that it was probably spelled j-o-u-g-e.

So I went back to Google and I looked up Shaku’s suggestion – ‘jouge it up’. And there it was – I found a blog post where the blogger used the expression. The author also posed the question of how to spell the expression correctly, saying she’d never seen that expression in written form, much like Kate. Well, a few people posted comments trying to give the author an answer, and after taking a look at all the comments there seem to be two or three accepted spellings… Here’s one of them: z-h-o-o-z-s-h. Yep, that would be ‘zhoozsh’ . Have a read at the comments if you’re interested in how the expression may have originated.

So zhoozsh it up,