Meaning of Birminghamize | Babel Free

Definitions

To make ersatz

dated, transitive

Examples

“1856, Ralph Waldo Emerson, English Traits, ch. Ⅴ – "Ability". “The manners and customs of society are artificial;—made-up men with made-up manners;—and thus the whole is Birminghamized, and we have a nation whose existence is a work of art;—a cold, barren, almost arctic isle being made the most fruitful, luxurious and imperial land in the whole earth.””

“He has a relish for unfamiliar words, words of recent coinage or of his own make, or that closely similar type of words to which age has brought a second childhood... After this “Birminhamize” will be a mere peccadillo...”

““Full Home Rule, first through a powerful system of local government (Chamberlain’s proposal to "Birminghamize" Ireland), later through a wider, national self-government, inexorably became the only Liberal solution.””

“The colloquial form of the city’s name thus entered the language as a contemptuous epithet. In 1861 the word was used to describe “The vulgar dandy, strutting along, with his Brummajem jewellry”; to “Birminhamize” was “to artificialize.””

“The horticultural site where some ladies naturalize is here revealed as a site where, simultaneously, others birminghamize—a nineteenth-century synonym, the OED states, for "artificialize."”

“In the 19th Century, the word Birmingham was used to mean artificial (the associated verb was birminghamize).”

“Indeed, the comparison of Manchesterize and Birminghamize showed that, from a semantic point of view, there are no differences in the relationship between the verb and the PN etymon even though the former is listed as deriving from a common noun, itself originating from a PN.”

CEFR level