ASK SUE-BELINDA

YOU may recall that some weeks ago I looked at a word for one of our readers – ”curmudgeon”.

It seems that “curmudgeon” was but the first of the ”word dominoes” to fall. Since then, there has been a steady trickle of queries about weird words arriving in my inbox.

English is a wonderful language – it’s rich and colourful, steals from many other languages and never ceases to delight and inspire curiosity. So with thanks to Jayne, Jono and Robbie (who deserve special mention as their emails were hilarious) and many others, let’s be off to examine some great words.

Robbie gets first word as it was he who pondered the question, “Are my grandparents just making up words or are these real?” In truth Robbie, I contemplated this exact same question. My Nan and Dar loved English and seemed to have taken it as their mission to expose me to every wonderful word there was. Robbie asked about the word ”lackadaisical” and told me that he’d used my ‘method’ – break the word up, see if any parts are familiar, look for base words and prefixes and suffixes. Using that approach, Robbie had decided the word meant ”of the kind of being at a loss for a daisy”. Well Robbie, points for good word skills but this word is special.

“Lackadaisical” is an adjective, so it describes a noun, generally a person, though at a pinch I imagine it could well describe an animal. It comes from the 1590s and is an amusing twist on the exclamation “lack a day”.

It seems that in the 1590s, when people were feeling overwhelmed, they’d exclaim ”lack a day” (generally thought to have meant “oh a wasted day!”). It meant that the day seemed wasted and nought had been achieved. Around 1748 we find in Sterne “lackadaisy”, which was said to poke fun at the woebegone exclaimers whereby they were called by the word.

By 1768 it was in common use, Francis Grose tells us, as a description for lazy people who have lost a day due to their own lethargy.

So Robbie, if you are accused of being “lackadaisical”, it might be time to get up and get on with it, maybe even offer some help?

Jayne emailed seeking “urgent help”. Jayne is a teacher and as I too taught, I felt an instant kinship for her. You see, Jayne has rules in her class and one of them is never use a word unless you are ”absolutely sure of its meaning”.

During one particularly boisterous art activity, Jayne asked them to stop the hullabaloo. Seeing an opportunity, the children pounced: “What does that word mean, miss? Where does it come from? Please tell us.”

Jayne then described the blind panic of having no idea other than the fact that her parents had used it when she and her siblings were noisy and her grandparents had used it on many trips to the movies. Truth was, she did not actually know and the children seemed to sense it. She described herself as a lone swimmer with sharks closing in.

All rules have consequences and the consequence in Jayne’s classroom for using a word about which you know nothing, is writing a full definition followed by two sentences in which the word is used accurately.

The children gave her overnight “to have a think” and, as Jayne describes it, she “unashamedly” contacted me for help. As I told Jayne, it’s a relatively new word arriving in our language around 1762 where it’s recorded with other rhyming reduplications such as “namby pamby” and ”argie bargy”.

It’s believed to be Scottish in origin and began life as simply ”hollo” meaning a ”racket or commotion”. By the time it reached England, it had attracted the reduplication of “hullo bollo” and by the 1920s had become more ”hip” by becoming “hullabaloo”, which was shouted on the dance floors as things heated up.

Thanks finally to Jono who emailed asking what his boss meant. Jono and his mates in the workshop tend to speak in the language of modern youth. When explaining to his boss how jobs were progressing. Jono’s boss told him to stop taking gibberish or he’d be looking for a new job. Just as Jono’s boss had no idea what Jono was saying, Jono was lost as to the meaning of “gibberish”.

“Gibberish” is a noun and pronounced as “jibber-ish” as the ”g” followed by ”i” or ”g” followed by ”e” combination makes the ”g” sound like “j”. You hear this in the words “giant” and “gerbera”. (There are exceptions – let’s be honest now, you knew there word be – one of these is “giddy”.)

In the 1550s London found itself home to Irish travellers and European gypsies. Both groups were rogues giving to gangs picking pockets or charming money out of folk with false promises or dodgy games of chance and both groups only spoke other languages between themselves – the Irish spoke mainly Kant while the gypsies spoke Romanian and Hungarian dialects.

Just as the word gypsy came about due to the misunderstanding that the people with their olive skins were from Egypt, the word “gibberish” was originally ”gipperish” and the word used to describe their language. So it was that anything that was incomprehensible was “gipperish” and with time and corruption caused by speech became, by the 1670s, “gibberish”.

The word survives to this day and means “rapid or inarticulate speech: talk in an unknown language”.

So Jono still has his job and is focusing on using SAE (Standard Australian English) when speaking with his boss.