The verb began as a concoction of Lewis Carroll in his Through the Looking Glass. The beamish boy slew the burbling jabberwock with his vorpal blade, which went snicker-snack: “He left it dead, and with its head / He went galumphing back.”
Most scholarly speculation about what was going on in Carroll’s mind as he coined the word suggests galumph is an amalgam of gallop and triumphant. The coinage applies nicely to sea turtles, happy yogic exercisers and expressive dancers, not to mention a parade of journalists traipsing after candidates through the primaries.
Gentile-American Person’s Guide. “What disturbs me,” writes Jack Tucker from somewhere in cyberspace, “is the politically correct way that Senator Joseph Lieberman has to be referred to on television: ‘a Jewish person.’ The media don’t want to say he is a ‘Jew’ because the word sounds so harsh.”
Not only is Mr. Tucker correct in construing media as plural, he is also sensitive to the oversensitivity of some newscasters. He was not the only one to notice the lengthy terminology: in a related vein, a call came from Gerald Rafshoon, the documentary producer who was a Carter White House aide, to ask, “How come I never hear ‘Episcopalian-American’?”
The use of the word Jew is not a problem in print journalism; both the New York Times and theWashington Post headlined “First Jew on Major U.S. Ticket.” One reason is to save space, a consideration of all headline writers; another is that speaking—even in quick news flashes—differs from writing. Speaking is more personal. That’s why many in broadcast and cable news preferred first Jewish person or first Jewish-American or even first person of the Hebrew faith to be so named. They had the vague feeling that the monosyllabic word might be taken as offensive—as it is when delivered with a curled lip—and went out of their way not to offend.
No Jew would say, “I am a Jewish person” or, except in the most formal circumstances, “Mine is the Hebrew faith.” Jews are comfortable with the adjective, “I’m Jewish,” or the noun, “I’m a Jew.” The reluctance of non Jews to use the “harsh” word is well intentioned, but such overly sensitive shying-away from the J-noun draws a sardonic smile from some Jews.
Formerly, when many whites referred to blacks in their speech, they hesitated to apply the noun to a person; instead of saying, “He’s a black,” they would say, “He’s a black guy,” as if the use of black as an adjective to modify guy somehow removed it from any interpretation as derogation. This awkwardness was removed by the adoption of African-American; that compound noun is not as stark as black .
Nouns often sound harsher than the adjectives on which they are based; thus Jew is felt to be stronger than Jewish, which could also be taken to mean “like a Jew.” Take blond/blonde: “She’s blond” is acceptable as a description of hair color, but she’s a blonde, using the noun form to impute fun-loving characteristics, could be taken by some to be the newly dread lookism.
What about Jewish-American; is it any different from American Jew? Yes; the difference is context. When I am in a voting booth, I can fairly be counted by demographers to be Jewish-American, and when I am in a synagogue, I can be identified as an American Jew .
Back to Senator Lieberman. He is undeniably a person and a member of a religious faith, but the quick identification is best: Joe’s a Jew. So is his wife, Hadassah, whose name is the Hebrew equivalent of Esther. The feminine form Jewess, popularized in Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe (1820), has long been considered sexist, like actress .
“Jew” is a perfectly good, and short, word and I resent and resist efforts to expunge it because bigots over the centuries have used it as pejorative. Doth a Jew not bleed? I am neither orthodox nor observant but proud to be, and be called, a Jew.
Jack Rosenthal
The New York Times Company Foundation
New York, New York
The day after Lieberman was chosen, I was listening to the Today show and everybody down to Al Roker was calling him a “Jewish-American.” It sounded odd to me, like Irish-American or Italo-American. I was chatting later with Tim Russert, who had been one of the talking heads, and he thought about it and agreed, and then suggested to his colleagues that they drop the phrase. Then Lieberman went on Meet the Press and used the term repeatedly, hisownself.
Adam Clymer
The New York Times
Washington, D.C.
Kenneth Tynan dreamt that Harold Pinter and Lady Antonia Fraser are living in Sam Spiegel’s New York penthouse, a garish leather-padded pleasure dome full of marble grilles and priceless art work. (He had gone to Sam’s house-warming party there and when he was asked what he thought of the place, said: “It looks like the men’s room at the Taj Mahal.”)
Q: Lady Antonia, can you confirm that you are a convert to Judaism?
Antonia: Yes, but as Dr. Jonathan Miller once said, “I’m not a Jew. I’m Jew-ish.”
Q: Mr. Pinter, are you aware that this apartment was once likened to the men’s room at the Taj Mahal?
Pinter: Yes, but it’s not a lav. It’s lav-ish.
Paul Streeten
Spencertown, New York
Hadassah. I erred in writing that the first name of Senator Lieberman’s wife, Hadassah, was “the Hebrew equivalent of Esther.” I was misled by every translation I can find of the Old Testament passage Esther 2:7, which reads, “And he brought up Hadassah, that is, Esther.” In that passage, that is is confusing.
The Hebrew word hadas means “myrtle.” It does not mean, nor is it the equivalent of, Esther, which may be the Hebraized form of Ishtar, a Persian goddess. In the Bible, the beautiful Jewish girl Hadassah took the name of Esther to better fit in with Persian society, where she became the queen of Xerxes and was able to save her people from annihilation.
Whoever next translates the Bible would do political pundits a favor by changing “Hadassah, that is, Esther” to “Hadassah, also known as Esther.”
Gig a Bite. After taking criticism for the cost of his government-subsidized office rental in New York, former President Bill Clinton announced that his foundation would pick up part of the cost of the park-view space. “I’m not going to let the taxpayer get gigged on this,” he assured reporters, and subsequently moved his office quest to Harlem.
Clinton has used that term before. He was asked by CNN’s Larry King in 1995 if he was likely to appear on David Letterman’s show, in light of the CBS late-night host’s caustic joking about the prices that the government paid for goods and services. “Since we got this procurement reform passed,” Clinton replied, “there are no more of those ten-dollar ashtrays and five-hundred-dollar hammers. So he’s got no gig anymore.”
In Clinton’s usage, the noun gig seems to be a pointed complaint. A century ago, George Ade, in his Modern Fables, wrote: “The Old Gentleman was very rough on Wallie. He gave him the Gig at every opportunity.” In army use, a gig was a demerit, and if you were gigged often enough, you would be expelled from West Point.
The noun has a second meaning, which originated in jazz lingo: “an engagement to perform, usually for a single evening.” In black talk, to work a series of short-term jobs is to gig around. But that’s not what we’re talking about here.
The slang verb to gig, as in “let the taxpayer get gigged,” primarily means “to cheat.” Earlier recorded use was in a Dialect Notes in 1914: “Say, didn’t you gig me a little on the price of that room?”
The word comes from fishing. A fishgig is a spear. “At each End of the Canoe stands an Indian,” noted a history of Virginia in 1722, “with a Gig, or pointed Spear … stealing upon the Fish, without any Noise.” Thus, to gig the taxpayer is “to stick it to him.”
Go, To! When you’re in trouble; when you need someone to pull you out of a hole; when your desperate circumstance cries out for a reliable partner, a trustworthy executor, a situational savior—to whom do you go?
At that brink of disaster, you do not go to your spiritual adviser or your spouse, nor your lawyer or broker. You go to your go-to guy.
“Cheney
… Carves Out Role as Go-To Guy,” headlined the Boston Globe. Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post called the frequently quoted think-tank analyst Marshall Wittmann, a master of sound bites, “the go-to guy for legions of journalists.”
The phrase go to was used in medieval times to dismiss with contempt, a brushoff currently expressed as g’wan or geddoutaheah. However, the origin of the alliterative encomium “go-to guy” is in football. A go-to receiver, the fourth edition of the American Heritage Dictionary alertly notes, is a player “relied upon to make important plays, especially in clutch situations.” While a body man is useful, a go-to guy is essential.
Goodness, Gracious. Donald Rumsfeld is what used to be called a “man’s man.” He is tough-minded, direct, virile, authoritative and sure of himself. As head of the Cost of Living Council in the early ’70s, the designated inflation fighter kept a tight lid on wages and prices and taught his deputy, a kid named Dick Cheney, how to crack the whip. He ran a tight White House as President Ford’s chief of staff and later, in the business world, was named one of the ten toughest executives by Fortune magazine. He is again secretary of defense, and woe betide the brass hat who tries an end run to lobby for a favored weapon.
If he’s so macho, then how come the phrase that comes most frequently to his lips—the words heard most often at his high-powered news conferences—is the sort of exclamation heard on The Golden Girls? In the height of dudgeon, professing shock just short of horror, Rumsfeld can be heard with his grandmotherly trademark: “My goodness gracious!”
To NBC’s Tom Brokaw, who asked about the pace of the attack on Afghanistan, the square-jawed SecDef retorted, “To hear your question and the urgency and ‘Don’t you need quick success?’—my goodness gracious! go back to World War II.” (Brokaw has done very well going back to World War II.) This was using the phrase as a straight interjection. Rums-feld also uses it in an adverbial form modifying an affirmative. Asked if he wanted Osama bin Laden dead, he answered, “Oh, my goodness gracious, yes, after what he’s done?” adding for emphasis, “You bet your life.”
According to the spouse of a senior administration official, speaking at poolside on condition of anonymity, Rummy began using “my goodness gracious” at New Trier High School in Winnetka, Illinois, where he first met his wife, Joyce, and continues to use it in expostulations at home.
What does it mean? What did Charles Dickens have in mind when he had a character in his 1841 novel Barnaby Rudge exclaim, “Goodness gracious me!”?
Goodness is a frequent euphemism for God, a name that many believe should not be taken in vain. Shakespeare used it that way in Henry VIII, and the capitalization is the clue to the substitution: “For Goodnesse sake, consider what you do, / How you may hurt your selfe.” The phrase, with gracious added, I conjecture, is based on “by the grace of God.” It also appears as gracious sakes alive and goodness gracious, Agnes, the latter partly drawn from the Latin words in the Mass, Agnus Dei … miserere nobis, “lamb of God … have mercy on us,” referring in that case to Jesus as sacrificial lamb.
By the mid 19th century, the vehement exclamation had acquired a connotation of archness associated with elitist gentlewomen. Under “Gossip,” the New York Times reported in 1855 in trochaic measure: “Goodness gracious! Mrs. Davis, / Have you heard how Mrs. Thompson / Spoilt her new broche this morning?”
Another substitute word for God is gee, though gee whiz and gee whillikers! are ways of not quite saying “Jesus.” Gosh led to land o’ Goshen! This was a favorite usage of the cartoon character Loweezy, wife of Snuffy Smith, in Billy DeBeck’s comic strip Barney Google. DeBeck was also responsible for popularizing the expression “tetched in the haid.” Many hear the phrase land o’ Goshen as “Atlantic Ocean.” That confusion is known as a “mondegreen,” from the misheard line of poetry that goes “laid him on the green.” Another example of this phenomenon, expressed by many young children parroting the Pledge of Allegiance, is “I led the pigeons to the flag.” Currently, ohmygosh and omigod are often expressed in writing as a single word, thereby avoiding the appearance of blasphemy.
The alliteration of goodness gracious has been matched in recent years by good grief, popularized by the Peanuts cartoonist, Charles M. Schulz. According to Joan Hall, editor of the Dictionary of American Regional English at the University of Wisconsin, the frequency of use of good grief and goodness gracious is running neck and neck, with good Lord and good gracious off the pace by half.
Exclamations beginning with great are holding their own. You can still hear great Caesar’s ghost! rendered half as often as great God! and great Scott! while great day in the mornin’ has gained a rural connotation, and a jocular quality has overtaken great balls of fire!
With unbowed head, we approach the secular use of holy. In DARE ’s survey, holy cow! is the most commonly used, followed by mackerel, smoke, Moses and cats. (Don’t e-mail me another; we are dealing here with exclamations neither profane nor obscene, not popular expletives.)
Have you noticed, from many of the ejaculations cited above, how religious allusions dominate the world of exclamation?
Examples: from ye gods and little fishes and heavenly days to hell’s bells and mercy me, the lexicon of astonishment is rooted in the wonderment at the eternal. Well, I swan is a way of ostentatiously not swearing, and the Pete in for the love of Pete and for Pete’s sake is Simon Peter the apostle. My stars! (originally my stars alive!) is thought by the lexicographer Sol Steinmetz to be an alteration of myst (all) crity, a transposition of Christ almighty! Heavens to Betsy is a mystery, however; Steinmetz speculates that it might be an alteration of the obsolete bedad! a euphemism for by Dad! itself a euphemism for by Gad! and alteration of by God! but that’s a long stretch. The archaic zounds! is known to come from “God’s wounds.”
Not all interjections of mock horror or other jowl-shaking expostulation have biblical roots. Don’t forget fiddlesticks! and get off my back. And, for crying out loud, you can still stamp your foot and explode with botheration! Come to think of it, that last is probably a euphemism for damnation!
After these explanations, will Secretary Rumsfeld—when seemingly taken aback or ostensibly outraged by a question, and with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs sternly at his side—continue to let off steam with the use of his quaint, old-fashioned, grandmotherly goodness gracious!?
Son of a gun! I hope so. Jumpin’ Jehoshaphat! I’d hate to see him change.
Gotcha. “A president can help purge the system of this kind of gotcha politics,” George W. Bush told Larry King late last year, defining the term as “pile-on politics.”
This month, Bush inaugural parade organizers gave prominent position to the University of Tennessee marching band, from the home state of Al Gore, in what the Washington Post called “a particularly galling case of political gotcha.”
This was a variation of gotcha journalism, a phrase defined by the Time magazine columnist Calvin Trillin in 1999 as “campaign coverage dominated by attempts to reveal youthful misbehavior.” Bush’s first choice for secretary of labor, Linda Chavez, described the firestorm that followed revelation of her sheltering of an illegal immigrant as “a game being played by the media, a kind of gotcha-game, where it’s a never-ending dribble of one story after another.”
Gotcha, the noun, has now been entered in the latest printing of Merriam-Webster’s Tenth Collegiate Dictionary, defined as “an unexpected, usually disconcerting challenge, revelation or catch,” its etymology “an alteration of ‘got you.’” I would add that the original verb phrase carried a second sense, “understood,” as in the exchange: “Capish?” “I gotcha .”
Longtime readers of “On Language” are familiar with, or are members of, the Gotcha! Gang, described here decades ago as “shock troops of the Nitpicker’s League” (the sort who insist that it be written “Nitpickers’ League” and have their own rump faction who demand hyphenation as nit-pickers). The GG takes particular delight in correcting the resident grammarian in
mock-furious letters directed to “you, of all people.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald used the term in its original, simple “got you” meaning in This Side of Paradise, his 1920 novel: “Ole zebra gotcha, Amory?” In 1974, an informal group of New Jersey state troopers called the “I Gotcha Squad” was accused of harassing and intimidating Camden County politicians.
In its current usage, the elided word gotcha is an attributive noun modifying journalism or politics or, alliteratively, gang. When did it first become a noun? Dealing with its derivation as that nominative part of speech, we enter delicate slang territory.
“A sudden discomfiture or humiliation” is the definition given in the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang, “or that which causes it.” Getting specific about student use in the early ’60s in the phrase “throwing a gotcha,” the noun gotcha means “the act of suddenly exposing one’s buttocks or genitals as a crude prank.” You thought the phrase had no salacious root? I can say only [insert here word under discussion]. There is no need to moon over this, because that sense of “flashing” is in decline. In a 1984 citation from the Knoxville Journal, the television interviewer Mike Wallace was quoted using the term in its current sense: “Wallace called that a ‘gotcha question.’”
Ground Zero. Three days after the World Trade Center’s twin towers were brought down, Peter Jennings told ABC-TV viewers of the emotional impact on those who had the chance “to go down to what we all call ground zero and see the work effort that is there and see the destruction up close.” A few days later, Bill Hemmer of CNN reviewed the alternative names of the site: “We’re going to take you now to the area known as the zone. Some people are calling it the pile, others ground zero .”
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