Golly

[Dr. Goodword]

• golly •

Pronunciation: gah-li • Hear it!

Part of Speech: Interjection

Meaning: An interjection used to indicate surprise or wonder.

Notes: Today's Good Word is a euphemism for God! when used as an exclamation. Words associated with religious figures, profanity, and sexual and excretory organs are often expressed via euphemisms. Usually the euphemism sounds like the word it replaces. Gee and Gee whiz! are euphemisms for Jesus, Gosh is another one for god, and darn replaces damn.

In Play: Today's slightly faded word is often associated with simplemindedness. Gomer Pyle, the simpleminded filling-station attendant played by Jim Nabors in the 1960s TV show, The Andy Griffith Show, used it a lot, but he accented the last syllable and dragged out the first: [gaaah-lee]: "Golly, Andy! You mean the sun doesn't move and the earth goes around it?" There is a common phrase containing golly expressing the determination of the speaker: "By golly, I'll never go out with that Aly Katz again."

Word History: Golly, like gosh, is a euphemism for god. People often point to the similar spellings of god and good and speculate that they are related. They are not. Good goes back to a Proto-Indo-European word ghedh- "to unite, join, fit", from which together also derives. God derives from PIE gheu- "to call, invoke", a word that also produced English giddy. The offspring of this word thrived among the Germanic languages, producing also German Gott, Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish gud, and Dutch god. (Golly! Didn't Joakim Larsson of Sweden suggest a neat Good Word for today?)

[LukeJavan8]

Good bye= God be w'ye, or so I've heard. A wish for safety
in travel.

[bnjtokyo]

Is it
"Good, by God, we're moving to Bodie!"
or
"Good bye God, we're moving to Bodie!"?

[LukeJavan8]

[George Kovac]

What we consider profane or unacceptable in polite company changes dramatically over time.

Words like golly, gosh, darn, gee, heck...all euphemisms to avoid religious words. Yet these euphemisms survived on their own, and, to today's ears, sound quaint, affected, prissy and old fashioned. But that is because folks today cannot imagine the mindset in which the "real" words would be shocking to use. Religion has loosened its grip, and as a result we can't shock by casual use of religious references. Hemingway once observed that the quality and intensity of a culture's ability to "swear" declined as it became less religious: he envied the power of swearing in early 20th century Spain, which apparently was religiously based.

So too with body parts. Time was you could say "breast" (a bodily region) but never "breasts" (a reference to a specific and unmentionable body part): The chaste sentence "She held him to her breast" was OK but not the overtly physical "She held him to her breasts." And in the lifetime of many of us, words like "penis" and "vagina" were never allowed--yet today their use elicits no horror, because, well, as with religion, we have demystified sex and other bodily functions.

So, are we beyond euphemism today, so sophisticated that we cannot shock "polite" company (i.e., what you can say in the office, on TV or to folks you do not know well). Hardly. We merely have shifted the categories from religion and bodily functions to....to groups we consider deserving of special respect. These groups change over time, but presently include ancestry/ethnicity, gender, sexual identity, race, various physical/medical conditions.

There are words today you just are not allowed to use without appearing crude and boorish. (Consider the NFL team the Washington Redskins. Or the late Christopher Hitchens explaining that he no longer used the perfectly fine word "niggardly" because listeners mistakenly thought the word was related to the "N-word" and therefor racist.) I say this not to defend the use of such words, but to point out that we are not necessarily more sophisticated or enlightened than our Victorian forebears who were unable to utter "God damn it" without shame, and thus exclaimed "gosh darn it." We just have different shaming categories today, a different set of taboo words, and our own set of euphemisms. To that situation, one might say "golly, so what?" or you could say "hey that really sucks."

[Perry Lassiter]

Fine discussion, Kovac! As is the Heany quote...