I was never in the military, and while we can discuss whether that’s a good thing or a bad one, it means I definitely missed out on a rich source of slang and cant. For example, today’s new-to-me term is gedunk, which I gather is a well-known term in the US Navy.
As I understand it, gedunk can refer specifically to ice cream or more generally to snack foods (candy, ice cream, chips); to get these things on a ship, you can go to the gedunk bar (compare snack bar). This isn’t part of the official mess; it seems like it’s stocked independently, and the snacks are sold inexpensively, and the proceeds go into a kitty for some communal goal.
Update (2020-09-11): By coincidence, I was talking later today to a guy who was ex-Marines. I asked him about gedunk, and he said sure, that was a Navy term that meant “junk food.” He pronounced GEE-dunk with a hard G, which I was not expecting.
I learned a bunch of this from an article on the US Naval Institute website that was going around Twitter this week. The article also walks through some ideas about where this unusual-sounding word came from.
In short, it’s a word from the 1920s that originally appeared in the Chicago Tribune as a kind of faux German for dunking cakes. From there it was picked up by a popular comic strip called Harold Teen, which used gedunk to refer to an ice cream sundae in which ladyfingers (cookies) were “gedunked.” (The research in the article seems quite thorough.) Here’s the panel in question, which I swiped from the article:
That would explain why gedunk first referred to ice cream, obviously.
Some interesting things here to ponder. One, faux German is also the origin of the word OK, which originated as the jokey “Oll Korrect” during an earlier period when some newspaper editors fooled around by making up funny abbreviations like that. (Allan Metcalf wrote a book about this, which you can read about in an NPR interview.) I think we moderns don’t realize how prevalent the influence of German was in the earlier history of the US.
Another thing that interested me is that gedunk is an example of 1920s slang that survived to the present (in this case, only in the Navy). I was just reading the other day that expressions like the bee’s knees and the cat’s pajamas are also survivors of a slang fad in the 1920s to use absurdist combinations of animals + body parts/clothing. (Expressions that didn’t survive include the flea’s eyebrows and the eel’s ankle.) Faddish slang is pegged pretty strongly to the generation that invents it, so it’s cool to see some of it come down to us even today.
Origins. As if having the coronavirus around weren’t bad enough, we’re now starting to edge into our annual flu season. I was reading about this disheartening development and ran across the history of the word flu.
There are a couple of interesting things about it. First, it’s an example of clipping, where we chop off part of a word. Sometimes we clip the beginning of a word (telephone > phone), and sometimes we clip the end of a word (laboratory > lab). For flu, we clipped both the beginning and the end—as most people know, flu is a shortened form of influenza.
That’s part of the story. The other part is how we got influenza in the first place. It’s another word whose origin is right out in the open: influenza is the Italian word for influence, which seems pretty clear just as soon as someone points that out.
In medieval times, the Italian word referred generically to an outbreak of any disease. This was before germ theory, so it was anyone’s guess how diseases spread. On the other hand, astrology was a well-developed field, so it didn’t seem unreasonable that a disease outbreak was due to (the) influenza of the planets and stars. By the 1600s, the word was used more specifically to describe the illness we associate it with today. The word influenza made its way into English in the 1700s, apparently along with an outbreak of the disease itself. Great cite in the OED from 1743: “News from Rome of a contagious Distemper raging there, call’d the Influenza.”
It’s a remarkable how some old names for diseases have stuck with us: influenza, malaria (Italian, “bad air”), distemper (“derangement of the humors”), cholera (“excess of choler” [yellow bile, one of the humors]), gout (from “drops” [of corrupted humor]), and probably others I’m not thinking of. Over time we’ve readjusted our thinking about the etiology of these illnesses, but the original idea about where they come from is still embedded in the name itself.
Update (12 Oct 2021): On Twitter, Danny Bate notes that the word melancholia is a compound of the Greek words melas (“black”) and khole (“bile”); the latter also shows up in cholesterol. Melancholia was thought to be an excess of that particular humor.
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