![]() GothamistĪ Gothamist or Gothamite is literally someone who lives in Gotham-but probably not the Gotham City you’re thinking of. It originally specifically referred to people who like to watch the coming and going of boats on a canal. GongoozlerĪn old English dialect word for someone who lazes or idles around, staring vacantly at something. GokeyĪny hole for peering through is a gokey. Glim-FlasheyĪ 17th century slang word meaning “extremely angry.” 16. … while glabreity or glabrity is a more formal name for baldness. To make something smooth or plain is to glabreate it … 13. GlaabĪn old Scots word for a break or opening between two things-like clouds or hills-through which something distant can be seen. GithermentsĪ random assortment of unmatching things. G.H.!Īpparently derived from a London printer named George Horne who had a habit of retelling old news, G.H.! is an old English slang exclamation used as a reply to someone who has just told you something you already knew. Other G-fears include gynophobia (fear of women), gamophobia (fear of marriage), and gymnophobia (fear of nudity). According to the Oxford English Dictionary, you can also be a gaping-stock, a mocking-stock, a scorning-stock, and a pointing-stock. ![]() Just as you can be a laughing-stock, you can also be a gazing-stock-namely, someone who’s being gazed at by a group of people. Gaspipe-CrawlerĪn old slang nickname for a thin, scrawny-looking man. GardevineĪn 18th century word for a wine bottle. GandiveeseĪs a verb, the old Scots word gandiveese can be used to mean “to stare bemusedly.” As a noun, it’s a name for a fictitious illness invented as a reason to get out of doing something. GalactopoteĪ 17th century word for someone who drinks milk. In turn, Gadzooks itself is the origin of gadzookery, a term coined in 1955 to refer to the deliberate use of old fashioned language. In this case, the exclamation “God’s hooks!”-a sacrilegious reference to the nails used to secure Jesus to the cross-morphed into Gadzooks!, Zookers!, Zoodikers!, and all manner of other much less offensive forms. It’s an example of what’s known as a “minced oath,” a linguistic phenomenon in which a potentially offensive or blasphemous expression is transformed into a weaker, less offensive one. The old-fashioned exclamation Gadzooks! dates back to the early 1600s, but remained in popular use through to the late Victorian era. Gabble-RatchetĪ gabble-ratchet is a bird that makes a lot of noise, once considered to be an ill omen. Today, you can expect G to account for just under 2 percent of any page of written English, and roughly the same proportion of words in a dictionary-including grandiloquence, the use of haughty, extravagant language. But as K steadily fell out of popularity among Roman scholars, C ended up being used in so many different contexts that it soon became necessary to differentiate between them-and so the new letter G, championed by a former Roman slave-turned-educator named Spurius Carvilius Ruga, took over the “g” sound and has remained in use ever since. Before then, C had been used in Latin to represent both the hard “g” sound and, alongside letter K, the softer “k” sound. ![]() Just as the letter J is derived from I and the letter U is derived from V, G actually began life around 2300 years ago as a variant of the letter C.
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