Two Etymologies

Author(s): Leo Spitzer

Source: American Speech, Vol. 25, No. 2 (May, 1950), pp. 152-153
Published by: Duke University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/453916
Accessed: 27-03-2019 22:45 UTC

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American Speech

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 152 AMERICAN SPEECH
Maine, gives
passing through a foot-loose also its etymology: 'Ce
interim
nom vient
getting acquainted with thesans doute du nom de
world,
Guibray,
soon find an attachment andpresspat
de Falaise [DWpt Cal-
vados, Normandie].
down into an independent home ofTous nos petits
their own. marchands de la Mayenne allaient
ROLLA MYER autrefois A la foire de Guibray.'
Olympia, Washington This etymology has been accepted
TWO ETYMOLOGIES by the FEW, s.vv. Guibray and
1. Gibberish
Guybray (the second form being
the old spelling of the place name):
The NED offers hesitantly the
one finds in these articles several
following etymology of gibberish other dialectal reflections of the
(also gibb(e)ridge): '? f. Gibber vb.
propG, name Guibray (first attested
(though that word appears later in in the meaning 'county fair' in
our quot[ation]s), after names of 1536) which extend over those west-
lang[uage]s in -ish.'1 Indeed, gibber-
ern provinces of France (Anjou,
ish is attested in 1554, the verb gibber
Maine, Normandie, Bretagne) that
'to chatter' in 1604 (Shakespeare).have given so many popular words
It may also be noted that gibber to English. I think it likely that an
shows a variant jibber (which, ac-*en)guibrage (underlying the Anjou
cording to the NED, may point to enquibrage) 'messy, cumbersome ar-
two different onomatopoeic stems: ray of heterogeneous objects [as
cf. gabber and jabber), while with found at the county-fair of Gui-
gibberish no j- variant is attested.
bray]' has given the English gibb(e)-
Now the dictionary of the French ridge (the original form, although
dialect of Anjou by Verrier and
attested only in 1603) in the mean-
Onillon lists the following nouns:
ing 'unintelligible speech, jargon,
1. enquibrage 'm6canisme, dispositif, verbiage' (cf. the kinship of Fr.
combinaison de pikces, en mauvaise part',
charabia 'gibberish,' originally 'the
'bric a brac, encombrement' (example: en
way of speech of the Auvergnats,'
vela' d'ein enquibrage = Fr. 'en voili d'un
encombrement') with Lyon charabarat 'horse-mar-
ket,' Saindan, Le Langage parisien,
2. aguibre'(e) 'chose ennuyeuse, com-
pliquie' (example: 'quel tourment, quel
p. 81); then, secondarily, the form
aguibre que tout gall')
gibberidge would have been associ-
The second word is also found in ated by popular speakers with the
the dialect of Bas-Maine in the names of languages in -ish (as in the
text of 1579, quoted by the NED in
meaning: 'tout ce qui est n~cessaire
pour faire un voyage.' Dottin,whichwho gibberish is opposed to Eng-
lish).2
lists this word in his glossary of Bas- As for the fall of the prefix

1. Eric Partridge, in his Dictionary of Slang, suggests, obviously because the word
means very often 'Gypsy slang,' the etymology Egyptian-which is, however, impossible
for phonetic reasons (no trace of -s-1).
2. A parallel case is the Old Prov. gergons 'vulgare trutannorum' (Donat proensal),
Sp. girgonz (mod. Sp. gerigonza) 'jargon,' originally a diminutive formation from the

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 MISCELLANY 153
en, cf. E. curse < Lat. incursus, E. French dialectal words in the lower
boy < OF emboid etc. strata of English (although often
no attestation in the written lan-
2. Goon
guage may be extant), I feel con-
H. L. Mencken in The American
vinced that goon goes back to Lyon
Language: Supplement II, p. 776,
and Macon gone 'gamin,' explained
defines goon, a term of union men,
in von Wartburg's FEW, s.v. ginna,
as meaning 'originally, a ruffian
as a back-formation from the verb
hired to intimidate strikers, now a
se go(u)ner which extends over a
ruffian menacing workers whowide re-area of French dialects in the
fuse to strike.' As to the history of
meanings 'to dress badly, ridicu-
goon, he writes: lously, to be dirty or ridiculous' (cf.
Apparently picked up from Alice the also go(u)ne 'femme de mauvaise
Goon, a character in Elzie Crisler Segar's vie,' i.e., 'slut'), meanings which
comic strip, Popeye the Sailor. As a verb must have originated in a change
it is an obsolete form of to gun, as in
of fashion by which the long, loose
Chaucer's The House of Fame, III, c. 138o.
As a noun, defined as 'a person with a Old French garment gonne (>
heavy touch,' it was used in 'The Goon gown) was abandoned by all but
and His Style,' by Frederick L. Allen, the lower classes of society (cf. such
Harper's Magazine, Dec., 1921. Mr. Allen expressions as Franche-Comte
tells me that it was used in his family
trainer la gonalia 'to wear clothes
before this, and may have been either
picked up elsewhere or invented.
indicative of poverty') or by chil-
dren (cf. Vionnaz gond 'cassock of
Doubtless, goon ultimately belongs children to be buttoned on the
to the word family of gun (gown), back'). A diminutive gonet 'boy' is
the etymology of which I have dis- attested in a text from Dauphine
cussed in the Journal of English of the thirteenth century by I.
and Germanic Philology, XLIV Pauli, Enfant, gargon, fille, page
(January, 1945), 94. But I do not 325. Goon develops then in a
believe that the goon was originally straight semantic line from 'badly
a gunner. In my opinion, goon dressed, dirty, untidy boy,' hence
must have originally meant a rela- 'street urchin' (- Fr. gamin) or
tively harmless type of person (like 'awkward figure' ('Alice'), then to
'Alice' herself) if the first connota- 'man with a heavy touch' (in Mr.
tion attested is that of 'a person Allen's words) and, finally, to 'tough
with a heavy touch' (for example, guy, plug-ugly.' The dark sound
President Harding, as opposed by -oo- may have somewhat contrib-
Mr. Allen to the 'jigger' Mr. Win- uted to the pejorative semantic de-
ston Churchill). velopment in American English.
Conscious as I am of the persist- LEO SPITZER
ence through the centuries of The Johns Hopkins University

onomatopoeic stem garg- (jargon) that has been jocularly incorporated into the group
of names of well-established languages: as if there were a *gargon-ici (> gergons etc.)
formed after romanice > Fr. romanz, vasconice > Sp. vascuence.

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