Una memoria como goma

[muckefuck]

Now there's a word I haven't thought about in maybe twenty-five years: jebe. I learned it as a Peruvian slang term for "condom". You see, my high school was Marianist, and the order ran schools in Peru as well. So one year we had a bunch of Peruvian students come stay in the dorm with us. It was kind of a fiasco--they were spoiled Lima boys and this was their summer break, so they weren't at all interested in being in school and mostly rubbed us all the wrong way. And even though I was taking Spanish, I didn't learn much of anything from them except a few informal terms like cachar and pinga (which my Spanish teacher even marked wrong on a test of anatomical terminology). But the tiniest of them showed me one of those calculator tricks whereby "bebé" becomes "jebe", and he had to explain the joke to me.

I don't think I've encountred it in the wild since. Its range seems to be very limited. The DRAE gives two synonyms: alumbre ("alum") and hevea ("rubber tree"). WordReference lists only the second of these, plus a variety of extended meanings (mostly informal) including goma ("rubber; eraser"), elástico ("elastic"), porra ("club"), trasero ("backside"), and finally the definition I know. The etymon is apparently Arabic šabb "alum", and how this gets transferred to rubber is a mystery I'm well unqualified to attempt to solve.

Comments

[lhn.livejournal.com]

Alum is/was used (as an alternative to heat, sulphur compounds, etc.) to cure (vulcanize) rubber. I can imagine alum-vulcanized rubber->alum, then having that generalized to all cured rubber (the way a "tin" can be made of steel or aluminum), but of course without evidence it's just a story.

FWIW, a 1900 book on rubber products identifies jebe as a specific variety of Brazilian rubber: "Fine Para; Seringa fina called by the natives Borracha or Jebe."

There's also a lower-quality variety called Sernamby de Jebe (or de Borracha), whose common name, Cabeça de negro, has an unsurprising but no longer socially acceptable English translation. (From context, it looks like sernamby must mean something spherical, since it gets paired up with names referring to balls or heads.)

Peru didn't produce jebe at all, but caucho (or simply "Peru".)

http://books.google.com/books?id=OytJAAAAIAAJ&dq=jebe%20alum%20rubber&pg=PA74