‘Sprinkles’ v ‘jimmies’? An ice-cream related debate has Philadelphians melting down.

At the Franklin Fountain ice cream parlor in Old City, a bust of Benjamin Franklin gazes benevolently down on two antique stainless steel bowls: one holds tiny, rod-shaped rainbow ice cream toppings, while the other holds chocolate ones.

For hundreds of years, or at least since 2004 when the shop opened, Benjamin Franklin has overseen “many, many, many” debates over what to call the iconic summer candies.

Shaun Brown, a senior shift lead at the ice cream parlor, grew up calling the sweets jimmies. That’s the word his grandmother used whenever she sent him down to the Frosty Top in West Oak Lane.

“She would always say jimmies, so I just always thought that was what they were called,” Brown, dressed in a flower-printed bow tie and black apron, said on a recent morning. Yet at the Franklin Fountain, most customers ask for sprinkles, he said. And when he asked for jimmies at an ice cream shop in Miami, the scooper stared at him blankly.

Veronica Rin, who works as Franklin Fountain’s hostess and soda jerk, nodded knowingly when she heard Brown’s reflections.

“The great debacle,” she said. She was recently speaking Spanish with a customer who asked, “Que es jimmies?”

She’d seen the dispute play out dozens of times, sometimes sowing chaos where, moments before, there was bliss. Like last summer when a newlywed couple came to the shop just after their wedding.

“They were like, ‘We just got married, but he wants jimmies, and I want sprinkles,’” Rin said. She offered them each their preference, hoping they might maintain their marital peace a little longer.

A few doors down on Market Street, at the Franklin Ice Cream Bar owned by the same people, both words are deployed on the same menu — a kind of ice cream appeasement strategy. Sprinkles are offered as toppings for customers who dine in, while jars of jimmies are on offer to take home.

In an email, owner Eric Berley refused to get embroiled in the debate.

“Some customers and staff use the term interchangeably with sprinkles,” he wrote diplomatically.

To some, the word jimmies is a Philadelphia point of pride. In the spring, when SEPTA advertised on social media that people could get “FREE SPRINKLES” at Franklin Fountain by displaying their SEPTA Key Card, one commenter replied with a terse correction. “Jimmies,” he wrote.

Cities up and down the East Coast, and especially Boston, claim jimmies as their own. The earliest known example of the word in the U.S. appeared in northeastern Massachusetts in 1941, according to the Dictionary of American Regional English, a hefty five-volume series that traces word origins.

Here in Pennsylvania, we have a relatively solid claim. Just Born Quality Confections, the Bethlehem-based company behind Peeps, maintains that the word jimmies was coined in the 1930s by an employee named Jimmy Bartholomew, who ran the relevant candy machine, according to a spokesperson for the company. She said that jimmies were a registered trademark of Just Born until the mid-1960s.

That may or may not be entirely true. In his 2004 book Word Myths: Debunking Linguistic Urban Legends‚ word enthusiast David Wilton wrote that he was skeptical of Just Born’s claim, because the United States Patent and Trademark Office had no record of such a trademark.

“How the name jimmies for the ice-cream sprinkles arose is simply not known," Wilton wrote. “It may be from the name of a candy maker, or it may be from jim-jam, a term dating from the sixteenth century that can mean a knick-knack or a trivial item."

Just Born declined to comment on the matter further.

Through the years there have also been persistent rumors that jimmies has racist connotations, associated with segregationist “Jim Crow” laws in the South. Both the Boston Globe and Wilton investigated that claim and neither found evidence it was true.

It seems there is no exact unifying geography of where people say jimmies or sprinkles within the city. Across town from the Franklin Fountain at C & C Creamery on Ridge Avenue, assistant manager Deja Mitchell said she grew up in North Philadelphia referring to the candies as sprinkles. That’s also what the sign in front of C & C advertises.

But while working at the longtime ice cream shop, which often has a line of cars snaking down the street, most people request jimmies, Mitchell said. That changed things for her.

“Since I started working here, I often think of them as jimmies,” Mitchell said, “but again it depends on who I’m talking to.”

Mitchell, like many Philadelphians, has learned to code switch. She eases any brewing tension by following up on customer requests with a simple, gracious question. “Rainbow or chocolate?” she asks.