Word Histories: Etymologies Derived From the Files of the Dictionary of American Regional English

BY CRAIG M. CARVER

gimmick

Radio Finland’s international broadcast includes five minutes of news read in Latin each week—an event that has attracted a certain amount of attention. “It’s a gimmick, but a good gimmick” admitted Juhani Niinisto, of the Finnish Broadcasting Company, to one reporter, Guesses at the origin of gimmick (an ingenious device or idea) include a blend of trick and gimbal (a contrivance for permitting a body to incline freely) and gimac, an anagram for “magic,” referring to any device used by illusionists. But gimmick probably derives from gibecrake, a fourteenth-century word for an ornamental bit of inlaid wood. Gibecrake became jimcrack and then gimcrack, acquiring along the way the broader meaning of “a useless ornament or knickknack” (“Ribbins, and Looking-glasses, and Nut-crackers, and Fiddles, and Hobbyhorses, and many other gim-cracks . . . and all the other finnimbruns that make a compleat Country Fair”—Izaak Walton, The Universal Angler, 1676). Alternatively gimcrack may be a compound of the dialectal gim (spruce, neat) and the Scots crack (a boastful lad), giving the early, now obsolete sense of “a showy, affected person” (“Lady, I pitie you . . . this [fellow] is a Gincracke,/ That can get nothing but new fashions on you”— John Fletcher, The Elder Brother, about 1635), which evolved to the present-day meaning “a showy, trifling thing.” Gimmick, a final alteration, appeared in the United States in the early part of this century.

phony

In an effort to promote Canadian unity and stymie the separatist movement in Quebec, Prime Minister Brian Mulroney proposed last September to grant Quebec recognition as a “distinct” society. The separatists, however, would have none of it, prompting Mulroney to retort, “We are not going to be able to deal with the phonies who say they’re interested in Canada but whose real objective is the destruction of the nation.” Phony or phoney (fake, counterfeit, false) is probably from the Irish fáinne (ring), which gave to English the slang word fawney. A fawney was used in a simple swindle known as a fawney rig, described in the 1796 edition of Francis Grose’s Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue. “A common fraud thus practised:—a fellow drops a brass ring, double gilt, which he picks up before the party meant to be cheated, and to whom he disposes of it for less than its supposed, and ten times more than its real, value.” These confidence men were called fawney droppers. When fawney came to America, around the turn of the century, its meaning was extended to “counterfeit" or “fake" and the word was soon altered to phoney (and later phony). In the 1920s it was reimported to England in its new form. But it was not until about 1940, when journalists began writing about the “phoney war”—the period of comparative Allied inactivity after the outbreak of the Second World War—that the word became widely known in the English-speaking world.

fogy

Last February members of the British Parliament demanded an apology from the Australian Prime Minister, Paul Keating, for what they saw as his rude behavior during Queen Elizabeth’s visit to his Commonwealth nation. Keating not only had indirectly suggested that Australia abandon the monarchy and become a republic but also had put his arm around the monarch, violating protocol. When members of his own Parliament also began to criticize him, Keating called them “old fogies who doffed their lids and tugged the forelock to the British establishment.”According to one source, fogy (an old-fashioned person) is from the Scots fog (moss, lichen) and its derivatives foggie and fuggie (“In wilyart [lonely] glens he lik’d tae stray,/By fuggie [mossy] rocks, or castle gray”—Robert Tannahill, Poems and Songs, 1806. In the late eighteenth century army pensioners gathered once a year in Glasgow and fired a ceremonial round or two of blank cartridges. These veterans were called foggies (“Gemmel was twenty years a soldier, twenty a garrison foggie, and twenty a wandering mendicant”—James Paterson, Contemporaries of Burns, 1840), because they were figuratively moss-covered, or foggie, with age (in American English a “mossback” is a fogy). Foggie or fogie then came to refer more generally to any elderly person who is behind the times. Other authorities claim that fogy comes from foggy, meaning “murky,” a reference to the stereotyped mental condition of old people. French fougueux (hot-tempered, impetuous) has also been suggested as a source, since old people are supposed to be quick-tempered and crotchety.