What is bling?

The wedding is now T-minus several weeks, and Valerie is throwing a new word around: BLING. As in:

"I need some bling to go with this dress."

What does this mean?

I'm not much when it comes to evolutionary theory, but my suspicion is that "bling" is a recent emergence from the primordial soup of language.

So I did some research: in the 1993 edition of The American Heritage College Dictionary (I'm old enough to have a hard copy on my shelves) -- in the 1993 edition, the word bling is not listed.

But look on dictionary.com and ... whoops there it is:

bling: also bling-bling, by 1997, U.S. rap slang, "wealth, expensive accessories," a sound suggestive of the glitter of jewels and precious metals (cf. Ger. blinken "to gleam, sparkle").

and

bling: noun, flashy, ostentatious jewelry; "the rapper was loaded with bling"

Aha, so the rappers and the Germans had something to do with it. And I was (blinken) right: the vintage is only1997.

So, flashy ostentatious jewelry. That's what it means...

Logos2Go

Genesis 4.22 And Zillah, she also bore Tubal-Cain, the forger of every kind of tool of brass and iron. And the sister of Tubal-Cain was Naamah. (Naamah means "loveliness" -- the Strongs number is 5279; the footnote in the Darby version translates the name as "charming").

1 Timothy 2.9 I also want women to dress modestly, with decency and propriety, not with braided hair or gold or pearls or expensive clothes...