How did the term "bimbo" referring to a dumb person come about?

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This word derives itself from the Italian bimbo, derived from bambino a masculine-gender term that means (male) baby or very young (male) child (its feminine equivalent is bimba). Use of this term began in the United States as early as 1919, and was a slang word used to describe an unintelligent or brutish man. It was not until the late 1920s that the term Bimbo began to be associated with females. The 1929 silent film Desert Nights describes a wealthy female crook as a bimbo and in The Broadway Melody, an angry Bessie Love calls a chorus girl a bimbo. The first use of its female meaning in the Oxford English Dictionary was in 1929, from the scholarly journal American Speech where the definition was given simply as "a woman". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bimbo Apr 30 11, 10:42 PM