''Perhaps the best idea I ever had,'' the creator of ''Peanuts,'' Charles M. Nobody knows why the police are called the fuzz.Ĭlosely associated with the rise of the warm fuzzies is security blanket. The origin of fuzzy is sharp and clear: its Scottish dialectical kin, fozy, derives from the Dutch voos, ''spongy, loose-textured.'' Fuzzy thinking is imprecise. The warm fuzzies in business use are ''compliments intended to reassure and motivate'' and in more general use ''lovable, squeezable, cuddly items or ideas.'' Originally a description of the feel of a child's soft and furry plaything, the phrase is now used in derision and has become a derogation of the treacly or overly empathetic.
The words are used together so often that the acting-company formulation has taken over: ''Hard-bitten East coast trade negotiators,'' wrote a New York Times book reviewer in 1988, ''will want to dismiss some of their arguments as typical California 'warm fuzzies.' '' The Times likes the phrase: ''Even 'gambling,' the term that once conjured up green visors, cigar smoke and gumball-size pinkie rings,'' wrote Gerri Hirshey in 1994, ''has been buffed with warm fuzzies. The first printed use found so far of the cuddling adjectives was in a 1979 Associated Press article about a competition among electrical engineers to make mechanical mice that ''bore little resemblance to the warm, fuzzy creatures they're named for.'' Soon a children's book by Claude Steiner was titled ''Warm Fuzzy Tales'' and an acting company called itself the Warm Fuzzies, turning the second adjective into a noun. In another context, the two words were joined again by Tom Hayden, the California politician, who spoke of ''community-based economic development,'' admitting that the phrase sounded ''a little warm and fuzzy.'' ''Warm and fuzzy math meets Cold Resistance'' was the headline of a recent article in Insight magazine about traditionalist objections to the teaching of mathematics that skips over the basics of arithmetic.
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