Gawk is less isolated than it seems, and its environment, however uncertain, may throw a

sidelight on its origin. Skinner was the first to compare gawk and G Geck, which leads to E geck and several other Dutch and English words. Skeat (1885-87:300-01 = 1901:115, first presented in 1885:

see anonymous a, b) showed that E geck was bor-rowed from Dutch. In the last edition of his dic-tionary, he made a special point of the distinction between geck and three other words: gowk, gawky, and OE ge¤ac. However, CD, which usually follows Skeat, shows greater reserve and only says that the connection between geck and gowk is doubtful.

E geck ‘fool, simpleton, dupe’ (1515) coexists with geck ‘gesture of derision, expression of scorn or contempt’ (Scots and northern regional, 1568; no citations after 1597, except in the phrases get a geck

‘be deceived’ and give the geck ‘deceive,’ but here, too, the only post-17^th-century example is from Ja-mieson), and the verb geck ‘scoff’ (1583; the same provenance). OED cites Du gek and LG geck (sb) and gecken ~ gekken, related to G gecken ‘croak.’

The group turns out to be onomatopoeic, a fact made especially clear by the synonyms of gecken:

gecken, gacken, gicken, geckzen, kecken, and gäcken ~

käcken (with long vowels: DW). Geck was origi-nally a Low Saxon word. In 1385 geck turns up as the name of a court jester. The word has survived:

Gecken ~ Jecken are the modern carnival ‘fools’ in the Lower Rhenish area. In its spread south, MHG geck encountered its synonyms gagg, gaggel, gagger, gacks, and the like (KS, Geck; gacks must be *gagg-s, with the addition of the ending -s, on which see Bergerson [2004]). At present, there is a near con-sensus that in geck and other such words ge- and ga- render the inarticulate speech of the mentally retarded.

Knobloch seems to be only one to deny the onomatopoeic origin of Geck (Knobloch [1972:989-990 and 1995:148]; the latter is part of a list, with a brief reference to the earlier work), for he con-nected the rise and spread of this word with the cult of St. Jacob (G Jakob[us]). In so doing, he joined Wackernagel (1860:343-345 = 1874b:163-64), whose suggestions were not so far-reaching, how-ever. Knobloch traced the names of many objects, including some of those called jack in English, to that cult and explained how ‘fool’ merged with

‘blockhead’ and simply ‘wooden object.’ His ety-mology runs into the same difficulty as the one that derives gawk from a bird name: each is sepa-rately convincing, but they ignore the larger pic-ture.

W. Barnes (1862:71) derived hundreds of words from imaginary roots, and Geck ended up among the descendants of g*ng. This idea was of no value even when it was put forward, but his statement is not entirely devoid of interest in light of Knobloch’s findings: “I hardly think that Jack, which is an element of many English words, is a form of the name John. It seems to carry some meaning of to go, to stir, or to act as a machine, or ineundi, as applied to the male of some animals.”

Thomson also wrote at geck: “See gawk and jack.”

He must have meant his jack 2 ‘mechanical instru-ment,’ which he derived from go, but did not elaborate.

Thus we are advised not to confuse gawk with gowk (OED), geck with gawk, geck with gowk (Skeat), and Geck with various onomatopoeic words (Knobloch). If Knobloch is right, geck ~ jeck should be kept apart from gagg, gacks, and so forth, but this is an undesirable approach to the entire group.

Several proposals concerning the origin of Geck turn up in older literature. In Schwenck’s opinion, Geck is allied to G Gaukel ‘trickery’ (< MHG goukel

~ gougel), gaukeln ‘flit, flutter,’ historically ‘show tricks,’ Gaukler ‘medieval itinerant entertainer, jug-gler,’ and geigen ‘move back and forth’ (now only

Gawk Gawk

regional; the meaning in the standard language is

‘play the violin’). He reconstructed the initial meaning of the root as ‘fluttering movement.’

Kaltschmidt also listed most words, including MHG giege ‘fool,’ that were later compared with Geck and added gähe ‘quick’ (Standard German jäh

~ jähe ‘sudden’), about whose origin nothing is known to this day. Lexer compared MHG gek and gougel ~ goukel, referred to Wackernagel’s deriva-tion of gougel from L cauculus ‘magician’s vessel (glass)’, and concluded that two words had merged in the history of German: L cauculator ‘ma-gician’ and some nomen agentis from giugan ~ giu-kan ‘make a quick movement,’ as in G jucken ‘itch’

(v).

Ten Doornkaat Koolman suggested that LG gek

‘fool, simpleton’ and gek ‘revolving pole’ (a sailors’

term) are two meanings of the same word united by the idea of instability and cited MHG giege ‘fool’

and several Low German cognates of Gaukel and gaukeln as belonging with gek. He thought that both were like weathervanes. A similar idea occurred to Zabel (1922:11-12), who showed that ‘mad’ is often tantamount to ‘turned; twisted.’ According to Uhlenbeck (1901:297-98/22), Geck is related to OI geiga ‘take a wrong direction,’ OE (for)gæ¤gan

‘transgress; trespass; pass by, omit,’ and Go -geigan in *gageigan ‘desire.’ (Feist doubted that the Gothic verb was akin to geiga, but Lehmann [Feist⁴] found their kinship probable.) Uhlenbeck’s etymology is neither better nor worse than those of his prede-cessors.

At gaukeln, Mitzka (KM) mentions Austrian gigerl ‘fop, dandy, masher, dude’ (which Nutt [1900] compared with E gawk). He traces Gigerl to MHG giege ‘fool,’ allegedly related to Du guig

‘grimace’ (in de guig aanstecken ‘poke fun’ and other similar obsolete expressions), but denies it at Gigerl (see also KS: no connection). According to EWNT, guig is indeed allied to Du gochelen ‘juggle, conjure’

(a cognate of G gaukeln) and giecheln ‘giggle.’ E giggle, Du giecheln, G kiechern, Russ khikhikat’ (stress on the second syllable) are among the most obvious onomatopoeias, like, for example, gecko, a Malay lizard, named so for its cry.

Faulmann derived all the words from strong verbs, sometimes attested, sometimes imaginary, but, as happens to most authors of erratic concep-tions, he occasionally had rational ideas. He, too, thought that Geck and E giggle are related, while MHG gehen ‘say, speak’ (pronounced and some-times spelled jehan), which he treated as their source, although not the etymon of Geck, may not be too distant from it, for it is usually compared

with L jocus ‘joke,’ their reconstructed onomato-poeic root being *jek- ‘chat’ (see Beichte ‘confession,’

from OHG bijicht, and Urgicht ‘statement, declara-tion, confession’ in German etymological dictionar-ies). Long before Indo-European scholars isolated the root of L jocus, E joke as a cognate of G Gauch and Geck occurred to Meidinger (1836:167).

Kluge (EWDS^1-7) refused to see a connection between Geck, gaukeln, and MHG giege. In EWDS^4-6, he suggested combining G Geck and ‘re-volving pole’ under one etymon. He did not refer to Doornmaat Koolman, whose dictionary he must have known well. Götze (EWDS¹¹, Geck) copied Uhlenbeck’s etymology (OI geiga, etc). When Mitzka took over EWDS (beginning with the 17^th edition), none of those words remained in the en-try Geck, and Geck was treated as an onomatopoeia without ascertainable cognates. Both J. de Vries (NEW) and Seebold (KS) accepted Mitzka’s treat-ment.

For completeness’ sake a few more etymolo-gies of Geck should be mentioned. Helvigius de-rived Geck from Gk eákain^wj ‘vain, useless, futile;

reckless, featherbrained’ and Hebr qq'j…… (chak) or q/j (chok) ‘portray, carve,’ and Wachter identified Geck with Gauch ‘cuckoo.’ He included three entries:

Gauch ‘cuckoo,’ Gauch ‘fool,’ and Gauch ‘juggler.’

For the last of them he suggested the Welsh ety-mon coey ‘empty, vain, good for nothing, insipid, foolish;’ (cf COCKNEY). Wedgwood¹ reinvented Wachter’s etymology; however, he removed it from the later editions. Jamieson misquoted Wachter but understood his idea correctly and found it unacceptable. Nares gave both occur-rences of geck in Shakespeare (in Twelfth Night and Cymbeline) and remarked: “Capel says from ghezzo, Italian; but it is rather Teutonic, as Dr. Jamieson suggests.” Capel must be a misspelling of E.W.

Capell’s name. This derivation could not be found in any of Capell’s major works. In any case, ghezzo

‘black’ goes back to Gyptius, the aphetic form of Ægyptius ‘Etyptian.’ The development was from

‘Africa’ to ‘black-colored’ and ‘fool’ (cf E blackamoor).

Finally, there is E geek ‘socially eccentric per-son’ and ‘someone engrossed in a single subject’

(in combinations like computer geek). This meaning had such little currency even in the late sixties of the 20^th century that AHD¹, published in 1969, does not mention it. For a long time only geek ‘per-former whose act consists of biting the head off a live chicken or snake’ was known. “Cf geek n[oun].

A freak, usually a fake, who is one of the attrac-tions in a pit-show. The word is reputed to have

Gawk Gawk

originated with a man named Wagner of Charles-ton, WV, whose hideous snake-eating act made him famous. Old timers remember his ballyhoo, part of which ran: ‘Come and see Esau / Sittin’ on a see-saw / Eatin’ ‘em raw’” (Maurer 1981:30).

The dependence of geek on LG Geck is undeni-able despite the unexplained difference in vowels.

OED (geck, sb) quotes an entry from an 1876 glos-sary of Whitby words (in the former North Riding of Yorkshire): “Gawk, Geek, Gowk or Gowky a fool; a person uncultivated; a dupe.” The dictionaries that do not say “origin unknown” suggest that E geek is perhaps or probably a variant of LG Geck.

The quotation from the Whitby glossary does not confirm this derivation, but it shows that geck, geek, gawk, and gawky were used interchangeably long ago.

6. Thus we have Gmc *gauk- ‘cuckoo’ (G Gauch, E reg gowk, from Scandinavian, as well as the na-tive form yeke) and from time immemorial ‘simple-ton’; G Geck and Du gek ‘fool, jester,’ both current for centuries (whence E geck); their southern Ger-man regional synonyms with the root gagg-; G Geck ~ Du gek ‘revolving pole,’ G Gaukel ‘trickery,’

also known since the Middle Ages; MHG giege

‘fool,’ Du guig ‘grimace,’ along with E gawk and geek, both recorded late. Several verbs may also be considered, though their affiliation with the previ-ous loose group is doubtful: OI geiga ‘take a wrong direction’ (and its cognates in Old English and perhaps Gothic), Gmc *jukjan ‘itch,’ MHG gehen

‘speak’ (< *’wag one’s tongue’?), E giggle with its counterparts in German and Dutch, and perhaps even G gucken ‘look’ ~ kucken. The German adverb gähe ~ jähe may belong here too. Nor should gauche, though a French word, be disregarded.

All those words are probably onomatopoeic or sound symbolic; the two types tend to merge. For example, G Geige ‘violin’ is usually traced to geigan

‘take a wrong direction,’ but Seebold (KS) cites MHG gîgen and gieksen and explains Geige as a humorous name of an instrument making shrill music. If the history of fiddle provides a good par-allel (see it at FUCK), the old hypothesis appears more persuasive, but the existence of gieksen, etc is a fact. See what is said about gecken and its syno-nyms, above. According to Skeat (1885-87:311), Du gek “is formed on a basis *GEK- that should be dis-tinguished form GAUK-.” In words like Geck and Gauch, clearly differentiated bases exist mainly on paper. While dealing with such formations, one is usually lost among countless pseudocognates; cf the forms discussed at FUCK and MOOCH. There is no need to derive gawk from Geck or Geck from

giege. These words are like mushrooms growing on the same stump: they are members of one root-less family.

Onomatopoeic and expressive words do not obey sound laws. They travel easily across lan-guage borders, their age is usually indeterminable, and it is often hard to decide which of them are native and which are borrowed. Wackernagel and Lexer believed that G Gaukler goes back to L caucu-lator. (Du Cange cites cauculatores glossed as cauc-learii, coccauc-learii, caucularii. He does not give cauculus with the meaning ascribed to it by Wackernagel.) Cauclearii or coclearii were conjurers versed in weather magic. The Latin and the German word are almost homonyms, and so are OHG gouggalâri

~ MHG goukalâri and L iocula¤rı@, another possible etymon of the German noun (see Mordek and Glatthaar [1993:39, note 29], where some references to the scholarly literature are given). Cf also the much-discussed history of E jig in its relation to OF giguer ‘gambol, sport.’ If, however, *jek-, *jeg-,

*gek-, *gak-, *gag-, *gok, and so forth were the ‘bases’

on which slang words designating movement back and forth, sudden (quick) movement, and all kinds of prestidigitation were formed in Germanic and Romance, borrowing need not be posited every time such similarities turn up. Words like gawk, geck, and geek may emerge at any time, stay in the language for millennia, drop out, and be coined again. At the end of the 19^th century, gaga ‘mad, crazy’ appeared in French and soon gained popu-larity in the English-speaking world.

Perhaps F gauche had a history similar to that of gawk and the rest. Gauche is believed to be a bor-rowing and reflect the Germanic root *walk- (as in E walk). This etymology is hardly right. Weekley (1921, gawk) suggested that gauche is traceable to E gaulick ‘left (hand)’; his hypothesis is even less plausible. If we assume that an old European slang word *gawk was current in the 15^th century (no earlier attestations of F gauche are known) and was borrowed by French with an emphatic pro-nunciation *gokk, it would develop like *vacca that yielded F vache ‘cow.’ Gauche would remain a Germanic word but of a humbler origin than has been supposed. However, the ground on which we stand here is so boggy that dogmatic exercises for students like: “Connect etymologically gawky, gauche, and left-handed” (so Hixson and Colodny 1939:117/11) should be avoided. Also to be avoided are equally misleading statements that

“[g]awky is the same word as the French gauche, and means left-handed, and therefore awkward”

(Bett [1936:193]).

Gawk Gawk

We have to return to the question whether E gawk may owe its origin to a bird name. Bird names not infrequently acquire the meaning ‘fool’

in various languages (cf E goose, booby, and gull among others), so that the path reconstructed ten-tatively in sec 3 is not improbable. Since such names are often onomatopoeic, it is no wonder that they can also be used to imitate inarticulate speech and refer to mental retardation. Booby is a typical example; gowk is another. The history of gawk and its derivatives could have begun with *gauk-.

However, it is possible that gawk was coined side by side with gowk. These would have been two variants of the same process. Gaga ‘crazy’ need not have been derived directly from a verb for gaggling, but an association between them exists regardless of the details of the process. Be that as it may, once gawk and gowk appeared in English, they began to interact and produce new words, one of them probably being gawk ‘left hand.’ Little is gained by the fear of avoiding the confusion be-tween gawk, gowk, and geck. Language “confused”

them long ago.

The chances that gawk ‘left hand’ is a contrac-tion of gallok or gaulick are low. In Wood’s list of so-called k-formations (1913; ModE words: pp. 14-52), not only gallack and gallock (31/182) but also ballack ~ ballock ‘left-handed, clumsy’ (14/108) is given, so that it is unclear where to look for the original form. Wood lists a sizable number of nouns like hullack ~ hullock ‘lazy, worthless person’

(23/214), with -ack ~ -ock after l; none of them has a contracted variant. This suffix occurs with great regularity in words meaning ‘trash; slovenly work,’ ‘mistreat’; ‘gad about in an untidy way’ (cf flammock and flummox 20/173, 174; the latter is known in modern slang with the meaning ‘per-plex’), ‘fool; slattern; person with a dainty or fas-tidious appetite or manner,’ and so forth. The presence of such a transparent suffix would proba-bly have hindered contraction. Wood does not suggest any origin of gallock. It is unlikely that gal-lok was borrowed from regional French. This word should stay in etymological limbo, at least for the time being.

GIRL (1290)

Attempts to trace girl to an Old English, Old Germanic, or Proto-Indo-European etymon have not yielded convincing results. Girl was probably borrowed into Middle English from Low German approximately when it surfaced in texts. The closest Low German form is Gör(l) ‘girl.’ In girl, l is a di-minutive suffix, and gir-, along with gor(r)- and gur(r)-, occurs in many Germanic words that designated children,

(young) animals, and all kinds of creatures considered worth-less.

The sections are devoted to 1) the earliest attestation of girl, 2) words deriving (or believed to derive) from the gor(r)-

~ gur(r)- root, 3) the suggested Old English and Proto-Indo-European etymons of girl, 4) the most recent suggestions about girl, and 5) suggestions about the origin of girl in old dictionaries.

1. In Middle English, girle, gerle, and gurle (u