Galore. What do these words have in common: galore, extraordinaire, akimbo, aplenty, aweigh, incarnate, fatale, royale, par excellence, immemorial, aforethought, and manque? The answer is that the dozen are “deferential words.” While the vast majority of adjectives usually precede the nouns they modify, the words in this list always come after the noun they modify.
Galore can also be internally spoonerized as Al Gore.
(See AKIMBO.)
Gargoyle. According to The Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown, the words gargoyle and gargle are related because of the gargling sound cathedral waterspout heads make. Both gargoyle and gargle derive from an Old French root, gargouille, meaning “throat,” apparently from the water passing through the mouths of the grotesque figures.
Gay came to life seven hundred years ago from Old French gai, “merry.” I grew up with gay as an adjective that meant “exuberant, high spirited,” as in the Gay Nineties and gay divorcee. Starting as early as the 1930s in the mass media, gay began traveling the linguistic path we linguists call specialization, making the same journey as words such as discrimination, segregation, partner, comrade, and colored. In 1938 in the movie Bringing Up Baby, the character David, played by Cary Grant, when asked why he is wearing women’s clothing replies, “Because I just went gay all of a sudden.”
In the 1960s, activists popularized the concept of Gay Liberation—occasioning much hand-wringing among some heterosexuals, who lament that a perfectly wonderful word has been lost to general usage, wordnapped by the homosexual community. But as much as some heteros believe they need gay, the gay community needs it more—as an emblem of self-esteem, as a more fulfilling word than homosexual because it communicates a culture rather than concentrating on sexual orientation. For those who decry the loss of gay to general discourse, I recommend that henceforth they be merry.
(See COOL.)
Gerrymander. Elbridge Gerry (1744-1814), a vice president to James Madison, is the inspiration for a political term in our English language. In 1812, in an effort to sustain his party’s power, Gerry, who was then governor of Massachusetts, divided that state into electoral districts with more regard to politics than to geographical reality.
To a drawing of one of the governor’s manipulated districts Gilbert Stuart—the same fellow who had painted the famous portrait of George Washington—added a head, eyes, wings, and claws. According to one version of the story, Stuart exclaimed about his creation, “That looks like a salamander!” “No,” countered the editor of the newspaper in which the cartoon was to appear, “better call it a Gerrymander!” The verb gerrymander (now lowercased and sounded with a soft g, even though Gerry’s name began with a hard g) is still used today to describe the shaping of electoral entities for political gain.
Historically, gerrymander is the first American word to be born in a cartoon. A special kind of populist literature is the comic strip, and characters and stories we encounter in our newspapers and comic books and on movie screens have exerted an influence on our language.
(See CANDIDATE, MAVERICK, POLITICS, SANDWICH, SIDEBURNS, SILHOUETTE, SPOONERISM.)
Ghoti. George Bernard Shaw, who championed the cause of spelling reform, once announced that he had discovered a new way to spell the word fish. His fabrication was ghoti—gh as in enough, o as in women, and ti as in nation.
There are many other “fish” in the A-B-Sea—phusi: ph as in physic, u as in busy, si as in pension; ffess: off, pretty, issue; ughyce: laugh, hymn, ocean; Pfeechsi: Pfeiffer, been, fuchsia; pphiapsh: sapphire, marriage, pshaw; fuiseo: fat, guilt, nauseous; ftaisch: soften, villain, schwa; ueiscio: lieutenant (British pronunciation), forfeit, conscious.
I stop here only because the game has become in-f-able.
(See EINSTEIN, HICCOUGH.)
Gobbledygook. Back in 1942, a blackout order came across the desk of President Franklin D. Roosevelt: “Such preparations shall be made as will completely obscure all Federal buildings and non-Federal buildings occupied by the Federal government during an air raid for any period of time from visibility of internal or external illumination.”
Roosevelt fired back: “Tell them that in buildings where they have to keep the work going to put something across the windows.”
Inflated and abstract writing such as that 1942 blackout order is called gobbledygook. The word was cobbled by one-time Texas congressman Maury Maverick, who compared the forbidding prose of Washington bureaucrats to the senseless gobbling of turkeys that echoes in the public mindspace. Gobbledygook, according to semanticist Stuart Chase, means “using two or three or ten words in the place of one, or using a five-syllable word where a single syllable would suffice. Gobbledygook doesn’t call a spade a spade. Gobbledygook calls a spade “a manual excavation device.” That’s why the one-syllable, three-letter word now has been replaced by the five-word, seventeen-letter “at this point in time.” Lest we forget, it is language that separates the human beings from the bureaucrats.
(See BALDERDASH, DOUBLESPEAK, EUPHEMISM, FIRED.)
Golf. Mark Twain is said to have called it a good walk spoiled, and Oscar Wilde defined it as a man fanning a ball with a stick.
Bob Hope quipped, “If you watch a game, it’s fun. If you play it, it’s recreation. If you work at it, it’s golf.” Arthur Daley added, “Golf is like a love affair: If you don’t take it seriously, it’s no fun; if you do take it seriously, it breaks your heart.”
Right off, please know that golf does not stand for “gentlemen only; ladies forbidden” any more than posh is formed from “port out starboard home” or cop from “constable on patrol” or tip, as a gratuity, from “to insure promptness” or news from “north-east-west-south” or you-know-what from “for unlawful carnal knowledge” and you-know-what from “ship high in transport.” Do not trust acronymic explanations of word origins.
Truth be told, the word golf is derived either from the German kolbe, which like the Dutch colf and French chole, means “stick, club,” or from the Scottish gowf, meaning “to strike.”
Personally, I don’t play this sport for two linguistic reasons: First, the word golf is, appropriately, flog spelled backward. Second, I have dedicated my life to being above par and don’t wish to flog myself trying to be subpar.
I also try to avoid being stymied. Stymie was originally a situation in which a player’s golf ball rested between the cup and another ball, obstructing its path. Some suggest that stymie issues from the Gaelic stigh mi, meaning “inside me,” while others point to the Dutch stuit mij, “it stops me.” Now that players mark their balls and remove the impediment, the word has soared off the fairway of golfing parlance and into general use to mean “frustrated, thwarted, blocked in reaching an objective.”
(See LOVE, SOUTHPAW.)
Good-bye. In our greetings when we meet someone and our farewells when we part repose hidden messages. Howdy is a shortening of “How do you do,” while good-bye is an elision of “God be with you” and so long of “Don’t let it be so long till I see you again.”
AT&T used to use the slogan “Make your every hello a real good buy.”
(See AHOY, CARNIVAL.)
Groak is a real verb that means “to stare at another’s food in hopes that he or she will offer you some, in the manner of dogs and certain people we know.”
Gry. The most pervasive, invasive, and evasive of all word puzzles that make the rounds of cyberspace is this challenge: “There are three words in the English language that end in g-r-y. Two of them are angry and hungry. What is the third?”
The greatest service this book can perform for you is to announce that the -gry question is a time-wasting linguistic hoax. This poser first slithered onto the American scene in 1975 on the Bob Grant radio talk show on WMCA in New York City. Word mavens have tried to bury -gry before, but it keeps rising, like some angry, hungry monstrosity from Tales From the Crypt.
The answer to the infernal question is that there is no answer—at least no satisfactory answer. I advise anybody who happens upon the angry + hungry + ? poser to stop burning time and to move on to a more productive activity, like counting the number of angels on the head of a pin or the reductions in your property taxes.
In unabridged dictionaries are enshrined at least fifty -gry words in addition to angry and hungry, and every one of them is either a variant spelling, as in augry for augury, begry for beggary, and bewgry for buggery, or exceedingly obscure, as in anhungry, an obsolete synonym for hungry; aggry, a kind of variegated glass bead much in use in the Gold Coast of West Africa; puggry, a Hindu scarf wrapped around the helmet or hat and trailing down the back to keep the hot sun off one’s neck; or gry, a medieval unit of measurement equaling one-tenth of a line.
A more realistically challenging puzzle of this type is “Name a common word, besides tremendous, stupendous, and horrendous, that ends in -dous.”
At least thirty-two additional -dous words repose in various dictionaries: apodous, antropodous, blizzardous, cogitabundous, decapodous, frondous, gastropodous, heteropodous, hybridous, iodous, isopodous, jeopardous, lagopodous, lignipodous, molybdous, mucidous, multifidous, nefandous, nodous, octapodous, palladous, paludous, pudendous, repandous, rhodous, sauropodous, staganopodous, tetrapodous, thamphipodous, tylopodous, vanadous, and voudous.
But these examples are as arcane as those that purport to solve the -gry problem.
Still, there is a fourth common word ending in -dous—hazardous.