wim.html - plural noun Also written womyn (Politics) ( People and Society ) In writing by or about feminists: women. Etymology: A respelling of women which is meant to reflect its pronunciation and is expressly intended to remove from it the 'word' men. The spelling womyn is an attempt to preserve the historical continuity of the word to some extent, in answer to criticism of the purely phonetic wimmin. History and Usage: The first examples of wimmin used in print date from the late seventies. According to a feminist dictionary , in August 1979 a feminist magazine 'for, about, and by young wimmin' explained the motivation for the new spelling: We have spelt it this way because we are not women neither are we female...You may find it trivial--it's just another part of the deep, very deep rooted sexist attitudes. By the mid eighties, the spelling had come to be particularly associated, in the UK at least, with militant feminism and with the peace wimmin or Greenham wimmin, feminist peace campaigners who from 1981 picketed the US airbase at Greenham Common in Berkshire to protest about the deployment of nuclear weapons at this and other bases. The spelling womyn, which developed in the second half of the eighties, offers the possibility of a singular form (much rarer than the plural). Wimmin rewrite Manglish herstory. headline in Sunday Telegraph 3 Nov. 1985, p.
13 According to Jane's Defence Weekly, the authoritative British defence journal, women members of the Spetsnaz forces have been mingling with the Greenham 'wimmin'...The Greenham 'wimmin' laugh at this suggestion. Daily Telegraph 23 Jan. 1986, p.
18 Why are these (ignorant) gay men (and sadly sometimes wimmin) stereotyping gayness?...Next time you see a feminine looking womyn...don't show hostility toward her . Pink Paper 17 Nov. 1990, p. 19

wim.html - acronym Also written Wimp, wimp, or WIMPS (Science and Technology) In computing jargon, a user interface incorporating a set of software features and hardware devices (such as windows (see window° ), icons, mice (see mouse ), and pull-down menus) that are designed to make the computer system simpler or less baffling for its user. Etymology: Formed on the initial letters of Windows, Icons, Mice; the fourth initial is variously explained as standing for Program, Pointer, or Pull-down. History and Usage: WIMPs were developed by Rank Xerox during the seventies and became commercially available in the first half of the eighties. The package of features--in which different tasks are allocated to different portions of the screen (windows), with small symbolic pictures (icons) and lists of options (menus) representing the different operations which may be selected by clicking on them with the mouse--has come to be associated particularly with Apple computers but was a general feature of the popular computing boom of the mid eighties. By the end of the decade, the idea of WIMP was already thought a little outdated by computer scientists, who had moved on to the excitements of GUI (graphical user interface), an even more advanced interface which would be needed for the development of multimedia. An intriguing WIMPS (Windows, Icons, Mouse and Pointer-based System) implementation that does a creditable job of imitating the workings of the Apple Macintosh. Which Computer? July 1985, p.
35 The Apple Lisa is generally credited for being the first machine to make use of wimps. In fact the idea first originated in the Palo Alto, California laboratories of Rank Xerox, but it was the Lisa which turned it into a marketable product. The Australian 13 May 1986, p.
45 With Presentation Manager the Wimp...will find its way onto the desks of millions of office workers. Computer Weekly 28 Apr. 1988, p.
26 Using the term GUI is stretching things more than a little, although the no longer fashionable WIMP tag just about applies. Personal Computer World July 1990, p. 128, icons, mice (see mouse ), and pull-down menus) that are designed to make the computer system simpler or less baffling for its user. Etymology: Formed on the initial letters of Windows, Icons, Mice; the fourth initial is variously explained as standing for Program, Pointer, or Pull-down. History and Usage : WIMPs were developed by Rank Xerox during the seventies and became commercially available in the first half of the eighties. The package of features--in which different tasks are allocated to different portions of the screen (windows), with small symbolic pictures (icons) and lists of options (menus) representing the different operations which may be selected by clicking on them with the mouse--has come to be associated particularly with Apple computers but was a general feature of the popular computing boom of the mid eighties. By the end of the decade, the idea of WIMP was already thought a little outdated by computer scientists, who had moved on to the excitements of GUI (graphical user interface), an even more advanced interface which would be needed for the development of multimedia . An intriguing WIMPS (Windows, Icons, Mouse and Pointer-based System ) implementation that does a creditable job of imitating the workings of the Apple Macintosh. Which Computer? July 1985, p.
35 The Apple Lisa is generally credited for being the first machine to make use of wimps. In fact the idea first originated in the Palo Alto, California laboratories of Rank Xerox, but it was the Lisa which turned it into a marketable product . The Australian 13 May 1986, p.
45 With Presentation Manager the Wimp...will find its way onto the desks of millions of office workers. Computer Weekly 28 Apr . 1988, p.
26 Using the term GUI is stretching things more than a little, although the no longer fashionable WIMP tag just about applies. Personal Computer World July 1990, p. 128

wim.html - In slang, a feeble, cowardly, or ineffectual person; especially, a public servant who has a grey or weak public persona. Etymology: Probably ultimately related to whimper. In the twenties wimp was Cambridge University undergraduates' slang for 'a young woman'; when first applied to young men in US slang, it certainly had implications of effeminacy. History and Usage: A word with a many-stranded history. The present sense seems to have had some currency among college students in the US from about the mid sixties; to them, a wimp was a weedy or effeminate man. During the second half of the sixties this sense became more widespread, passing into British English as well. By the late seventies a slightly different sense had cropped up in US teenagers' slang: to describe someone as a wimp was to imply that this person was old-fashioned, especially in dress and appearance. The two meanings came together in US slang in connection with the vice-presidential and presidential campaigns of George Bush at the end of the eighties: when a number of journalists seemed to be trying to gain him a reputation as a wimp, there was some discussion of the implications of the label, from which it emerged that it was as much his background and appearance ( typical of the 'Preppie') as his grey image that had prompted it. So frequently was this taunt used that it even came to be referred to as the W-word (by analogy with F-word) in some sources; Mr Bush sought to counter it in his read my lips speech and policy. Wimp has a number of derivatives, mostly connected with the connotations of cowardice and spinelessness: for example, the adjective wimpish and the nouns wimpery and wimpishness. In the US during the late seventies and eighties, a phrasal verb with out also developed: to wimp out is to 'chicken out' or fail to face up to a situation; the corresponding noun is wimp-out. 'We thought the Brits might wimp out. After Libya we hoped that the United States would not have to go out in front again,' said a senior American intelligence official. Sunday Telegraph 26 Oct. 1986, p.
40 Vice President George Bush is a preppy, despite many mouse-brained journalists' continued attempts to hang the wimp label on him. Maledicta 1986-7, p.
23 Bush and Jesse Jackson...are battling serious image problems that forced Bush to declare he is not a 'wimp'. Kuwait Times 18 Oct. 1987, p.
5 That word 'wimp', when used by an American about Mr Bush, is partly a euphemism for upper class. Sunday Telegraph 12 June 1988, p. 22

wim.html - n.
colloq. a feeble or ineffectual person.

wimpish adj. wimpishly adv. wimpishness n. wimpy adj. [20th c.: orig. uncert.]

wim.html - n. & v.
--n.

a linen or silk head-dress covering the neck and the sides of the face, formerly worn by women and still worn by some nuns.

--v.

tr. & intr. arrange or fall in folds. [OE wimpel]

wim.html - n.
(pl. -ies) propr. a hamburger served in a plain bun.