User:Oeloeloel

ZILCH means something to me. I know the meaning of Antonyms and Synonyms, but I didn't learn the meaning of Eponym until I became one. This is the story of how I became a living Eponym of a word the means "nothing". This is a story that asks why, of the thousands of non-dictionary words used in oral communication in jest or anger every day, this word "zilch" caght on and became to be used world wide. There were certainly enough words meaning nothing, such as; nil; zip; zero; naught; and of course nothing. Our story begins in the early 1960's in an industrial section of Newbury Park, California.

Technology Instrument Corporation, later to be Bowmar/TIC, was located in this Southern California industrial park with companies such as Packard-bell, Northrop, Semtes, etc. TIC was a company that designed and manufactured precision rotary components such as potentiometers, switches, and commutators in addition to electro-mechanical packages. I was sales manager from 1958 thru 1964 of this Company whose sales were approximately five million annually, made up of contracts ranging from twenty five thousand to four hundred thousand. Unfortunately the sales input was very uneven causing difficult management problems of too many employees and not enough business causing profit problems or too much business and not enough employees making for late deliveries.

Every week the Managers of Sales, Engineering, Accounting, and Manufacturing met with the President, Mr. Joe Looney, and Vice President, Mr. Ivan Dornbush, to discuss, review, and plan the Company's general plan of action. The weekly management meeting, a common business activity, is quite often opened with the sales information, at least that was the procedure of the TIC President and Vice President. The most important announcement, not only to the officers, but to all of us, was the response to the first question posed by the President, "What have you sold this week, Sielsch? Alas, too often, I sadly answered, "nothing". Of course I would speak up about some bidding activity which could result in business in the near future, but that didn't remove the frown from the President's face.

At one of those weekly gatherings, after too amny weeks of "nothing" responses Mr. Looney opened the meeting with a very sardonic rendition "What have you sold this week, (slight pause), ZILCH?" somewhat humorously predicting the expected "nothing" by playing with my name. My name is pronounced like a window "sill", and like telling someone to be quiet "shh". So together Sielsch sounds like SILSH. But looney's SILCH, was much easier to pronounce with the 'Z' emphasized almost as in ZERO. This opening became a regular practice, and even during good times (lots of sales and few nothings) ZILCH was it. And then it started. When walking through the halls of the TIC plant I'd get a humorous ZILCH from passers by, especially from those knowledgable of the Sales situations of the Company. It wasn't long before it became a common greeting.

So, often during the past forty years, when confronted with the word ZILCH in various media, it would often take me back to the old days at TIC. Then one day I read the definition of ZILCH in the Merriam Webster's Collegiate Dictionary. Of course it stated that the meaning was "nothing, zero". But what caught my attention was that although it stated that the origin of the word ZILCH was unknown, it mentions CA. 1966. The lights came on. After seeing the word in print, hearing it in movies and on television, and even using it myself in conversations, I was thinking the unthinkable ... the word ZILCH originated in the executive meeting room from those days at Bowmar/TIC.

Now I was motivated to research the word ZILCH on the Web. I googled ZILCH, and to my surprise I got 1,570,00 hits, Wow! Now I had the task of reviewing those hits that would possibly contain origin information, such as World Wide Words which states it first appears in print in the mid 1960's. It also states that Ballyhoo magazine published in 1931 had one of its characters as Mr. Zilch. But the years between 1930 and the 1960's are a complete blank as far as the development of the word is concerned. The Merriam-Webster Online states that while virtually nothing was known about the origin of ZILCH, lexicographers traced that term's print to the mid 1960's.

So, I go back to my opening paragraph where I asked why-oh-why has ZILCH, an unnecessary word for which there are already many "nothing" words, come into such broad and popular usage? It is my hope that some of you readers of this story will be an Etymologist or Lexicographer or Linguistics person who can shed some light onto this etymological puzzle. HELP!