Jappy

English

Etymology 1

From Japanese.

Adjective

Jappy (comparative more Jappy, superlative most Jappy)

1. (slang) Japanese
   • 1959, Beatrice Plumb, The Master Banquet and Party Book, T. S. Denison & Company, pages 85

     To be really Jappy...

   • 1898 (2005), George Cornwallis-West, quoted in Elizabeth Kehoe, The Titled Americans: Three American Sisters And the British Aristocratic World Into Which They Married, →ISBN, page 206

     When George moved to London later that year Jennie received him at her home, wearing a loose Japanese kimono instead of the conventional whale-boned corset and gown. The young, infatuated lieutenant wrote ecstatically of the 'lovely Jappy gown'.

Etymology 2

From JAP +‎ -y, an acronym of the phrase Jewish American princess.

Adjective

Jappy (not comparable)

1. Materialistic and shallow in a way stereotypically associated with Jewish women.
   • 1989, Carol Diament, Jewish Marital Status: A Hadassah Study, Jason Aronson:

     ... erasing the term from society's consciousness without changing Jewish women's "Jappy" behavior makes about as much sense as a campaign to eradicate lung cancer while insisting on people's right to smoke.

   • 1992, Janice L. Booker, Yale Strom, The Expulsion of the Jews: Five Hundred Years of Exodus, Spi Books Trade

     Nora once described a neighbor who was a convert to Judaism . “ She converted the whole way , ” she said . “ She is as Jappy as anybody on the block.

   • 1995, Myrna Frommer, Harvey Frommer, Growing Up Jewish in America: An Oral History, Harcourt, →ISBN:

     It was then that I began associating being Jewish with being Jappy and snobbish.

   • 1995, Ellen Jaffe-Gill, Ellen Jaffe McClain, Embracing the Stranger: Intermarriage and the Future of the American Jewish Community, Basic Books:

     Evelyn Torton Beck writes, "I have repeatedly heard young Jewish women admit that they would be offended to be called 'too Jewy,' but claim not to mind being called 'too Jappy.' "

   • 2016, Kevin Morris, All Joe Knight: A Novel, Open Road + Grove/Atlantic, →ISBN:

     I got my rap down with the Jewish girls. I was foreign to them, I didn't dress well. The jappier the better.

   • 2008, Nathan Abrams, Jews and Sex, →ISBN:

     Today, the stereotype is no longer immediately associated with Jews, as in Legally Blonde or Beverly Hills 90210 or The O.C., where the Jappiest characters are not even Jewish.