The gallywampus is a large, wobbly insect that looks like an overgrown mosquito. These long-legged creatures and others like them go by lots of funny-sounding names, including gallinipper, gabber napper, and granny-nipper. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Gallywampus”
Welcome to A Way with Words.
This is Elizabeth, and I’m calling from Lawrence, Kansas.
Hi, Elizabeth. Welcome to the show.
Well, I wanted to ask you about the name of a large flying insect, which I grew up calling a gollywampus, which to me reminds me of, like, Lewis Carroll and the Jabberwocky or something.
But I always grew up calling these large insects that would get into the house, particularly in the summertime, and they kind of look like flying daddy-long legs with wings.
So just really large flies with really long legs that kind of stumble around and sort of seem to be like Wampus, Wampus, Wampus and just bumping into things.
And so this was a normal thing to call them for me.
But when I first got married, I was in the kitchen of our rental house and maybe the back screen was open an inch or something.
And one of these got inside and I shouted at my husband, Nathan Kilbergali Wampus.
And he was in the other room and I think he thought I was having a stroke or something.
And he was like, what are you talking about?
And I pointed at the insect, and he’s like, that’s like a large fly.
And I was like, it’s a gollywampus.
And so then we had to do a bunch of Googling, and we determined that it’s a crane fly.
But I was just wondering where gollywampus came from.
Elizabeth, I’m loving this story and wishing I were a crane fly on the wall to watch it.
These are the ones that are often mistaken as mosquitoes by people who don’t know better, right?
But they’re bigger than mosquitoes usually, aren’t they?
They’re really big.
Yeah, they’re pretty large.
And they’re kind of clumsy.
They fly pretty slowly, and they’re not particularly intimidating.
It’s just, you know, a large flying insect, which can be alarming.
These insects go by a lot of names that sound similar to that.
A lot of people call them gallinippers.
Have you heard that one?
No.
Yeah, there’s galley nipper and gabber napper and gala whopper and granny nipper.
Granny nipper.
Oh.
Which sounds very ominous, doesn’t it?
Yeah.
It may have been influenced by the term golly whopper, which is a term in the South that’s used for something that’s really extraordinary, like extraordinarily big or something like that.
But you also have the wampus in there.
Right, which is another whole path, right?
Yeah, yeah, which may be influenced by the term catawampus, which was kind of an imaginary beast.
Yeah, so wampus and catawampus and galawampus were often used for either a large feline of unknown origin, kind of mythological, or it’s the thing that you would threaten the children with when they didn’t go to bed, or it was the punchline to the ridiculous story that you were telling to your friends as you were drinking around the campfire, that sort of thing.
Okay, so maybe it has more in common with Jabberwocky than I thought.
Yeah, it could.
Yeah, yeah, just a fun, fanciful word.
You definitely need to keep calling it that, Elizabeth.
Oh, I will.
I mean, I haven’t stopped.
I think my husband will correct me.
He’ll be like, it’s a crane fly.
And I’m like, well.
No, it’s a gollywampus.
Well, Elizabeth, thank you so much for calling.
Yeah, thanks for answering my question, and I love the show, and we’ll keep listening.
Take care.
Bye.
Bye-bye.
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