GONZO--Word History revised

[Dr. Goodword]

• gonzo •

Pronunciation: gahn-zo • Hear it!

Part of Speech: Adjective

Meaning: Bizarre, outrageously unusual, very 'far out', out-of-sight, off the deep end.

Notes: This odd term first surfaced in a 1971 article by William Cardoso of the Boston Globe describing the journalist-novelist Hunter Thompson, author of the novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Thompson was a journalist who seemed out of control. His bizarre reportage of the Kentucky Derby focused on the drugs, sex, and vulgar behavior of the attendees rather than on the race they presumably came to observed.

In Play: Gonzo is still an adjective sulking in the shadows of English, not yet fully 'outted' except as the name of a purple Muppet on the children's TV show, Sesame Street (Gonzo the Great). In colloquial US English, however, you hear it occasionally in phrases like this: "Sally Fort showed up at the party in a gonzo outfit that looked like something picked up at a second-hand clothing store in the sixties."

Word History: Cardoso claimed he picked this word up from Boston slang, where it may have arisen from Italian gonzo "idiot, fool". This word goes back to the Proto-Indo-European root ghans- "goose", which became German Gans "goose" and English gander, extended by the ever-popular -er suffix. The association of geese with dolts and dimwits is common in Indo-European languages, as we see in the English expression, "you silly goose". This sense became the dominant one in Italian and today it is the only meaning of gonzo ("goose" is oca). The sense of "outlandish" in Boston slang could have resulted from the misprision of the Italian word by the Irish-Catholics of Boston. (Today's Good Word came to us courtesy of the mysterious Klimt of the Alpha Agora and the comments of Michael Salsburg.)

[Perry]

If you want to make it more personal, say "ciao bella (or bello)".

In bocca lupo!

[Cacasenno]

Messed up, innit?


Ciao, ciao!