There are two ways to say enthusiasm. One of them is enthuzimuzzy, and it is not a compliment.

J. Redding Ware put it in Passing English of the Victorian Era (1909) as society slang of the nineteenth century, and his definition is careful: a satirical reference to enthusiasm. It is not a word for being keen. It is a word for making fun of someone who is.

The trick is in the sound. Take a serious, slightly pious word — enthusiasm — and give it a bouncing nursery ending, the way hocus gets pocus or hurly gets burly. The meaning stays; the dignity goes. Say her enthuzimuzzy for the project and you have described her eagerness and rolled your eyes at it in the same breath.

Ware credits the word to someone he calls Braham the terror — at least, that is how both scanned copies we read print it — without saying who that was. We have not been able to identify him, so we leave it there.

The joke is older than Ware's book. Green's Dictionary of Slang finds an earlier form, entousy mousy, in the London Satirist at the end of 1832, sneering at a royal toast drunk with equal entousy mousy. Ware's spelling is the one that stuck.

It is a handy word to have. Used on someone else, it is a put-down. Used on yourself — forgive my enthuzimuzzy — it gets the eye-roll in before anyone else can.