Calling someone a “popinjay” is slightly archaic, but still in use; the guy who was White House Communications Director for about a week a few years back, Anthony Scaramucci, was called a “popinjay” by several commentators. It appears to have been Felix Salmon’s idea, who started it all the way back in 2011, when he also called Scaramucci “The very worst of Wall Street, made flesh.”
“Popinjay” appeared in Europe more than 500 years ago during the Crusades. It was borrowed from the Arabic “babbaga” (parrot), and ended up in Italian (pappagallo, also a brand of shoe, I’m told), Spanish (papagayo), and Catalan (papagall). It also showed up in theater; Papageno and Papgena in The Magic Flute by Mozart are variants. By the way, “Scaramucci” shows up in the theatre too; I’ll get back to that.
There have been a lot of ways to spell popinjay in English, including “papaga, popengaie, papiayez, papyngo, and papejoy” (there are more, but you get the idea). It was originally used to mean a parrot, but between about 1300 and 1500 usage shifted to mean “a vain, conceited, shallow, talkative person”, which is what it still means today.
A few other famous/infamous people have recently been insulted (that’s the point of the word, after all) by being called a “popinjay”. Christopher Hitchens, the late writer, was called a popinjay in 2005 by a Labour MP, but in true Hitchens fashion seem to actually enjoy it and used it himself. Nigel Farage was called a popinjay in the British press.
There’s a sport played in (at least) Denmark and Scotland called “popinjay;” it’s some sort of shooting with either bows or rifles, and involves poles in some odd way. There’s also a company called Popinjay.co selling “luxurious craftsmanship” (whatever that is), and explaining that they adopted the name because “a parrot is a voice” and “Our popinjay is the voice of good fashion…” MMmmmmokay then. Speaking of craftsmanship, even though Richard Sennett seems to have completely misread Hanna Arendt in his book The Craftsman when he talks about “homo faber” and “animal laborans” (Arendt delved into these in The Human Condition), the idea of a nonutilitarian value of “craft” is probably something a popinjay would, in fact, harp on.
But speaking of harps, Anthony Scaramucci’s name is a plural of “scaramuccia,” which means “little skirmisher,” and the French version (scaramouche) has been a standard character in Italian comedy for several centuries. Scaramouche is the character always being hammered by Harlequin. The English version of this is Punch and Judy. And of course Scaramouche appears in the Queen song Bohemian Rhapsody (where it’s left to the listener’s imagination as to whether or not he actually performs the fandango), and in the 1921 novel Scaramouche by Rafael Sabatini. Sabatini’s book was quite the bestseller at the time, and was made into a silent movie in 1923 as well as a technicolor action flick in 1952.
In every incarnation, though, Saramouche (and evidently Scaramucci) and “popinjay” are pretty much the same thing.
