Tom in Tallahassee, Florida, wonders why he and his fellow buddies called the store on a ship the gedunk, also geedunk, and also applied the word to the sweets and other goodies they purchased there. As Paul Dickson notes in his book War Slang, some servicemembers believe the word derives from the sound of a snack landing with a thud in a vending machine. More likely, though, it was inpsired by the gedunk sundaes mentioned in a popular cartoon from the 1920s called Harold Teen. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “What’s the Origin of “Gedunk”?”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hey, how are you?
Doing fine. Who’s this and where are you calling from?
Tom in Tallahassee, Florida.
Hi, Tom. Welcome to the show.
What can we do for you, Tom?
I always had a real curiosity about the word geedunk. It’s a term I heard in the Navy. When you went to the ship store, you went to the geedunk. When you’re at the ship store, you buy geedunks. So it could be a range from candies to cigarettes to whatever.
And so you were in the Navy?
Correct.
And how long ago would that be?
I was in there from 60 to 64.
60 to 64.
Gotcha.
So G-E-D-U-N-K, and you might spell that what?
G-E-D-U-N-K?
That’s as close as I could get.
So I like it. So it’s both the place that you buy the sweets and the sweets themselves?
Correct.
That conforms with what I know. I think we talked about this once before on the show, and I dug up some information on this for one of my books. And it’s got a really interesting history. It probably dates back to a comic strip from 1925. There was a comic strip called Harold Teen, T-E-E-N. And it was at a time when comic strips could be popular, and they actually had an influence on language and culture in the United States.
And so in the comic strip, these teens go to soda fountains, and they have a Gidank or a Gidank Sunday. And sometimes it’s just a sundae like we know it today, you know, with the whipped cream and the cherry and the banana and the ice cream in the glass dish. Sometimes it’s an ice cream float where they plop a scoop of ice cream into the soda. And the story supposedly is, although it’s never explained in the comic strip, that the name Giedonk is roughly the sound that an ice cream float makes when you put the ice cream into the soda. It’s that noise, that plopping noise almost.
Though I know many years later, I’ve seen this in Paul Dixon’s War Dictionary. There’s an entry for gedunk. And many soldiers or Navy men or so forth, because sometimes used in the Army and Marines as well, they believe that it’s the sound of the vending machine that you might get that chunking noise when you get candy out of the vending machine. So like a grunk, a big mechanical weird noise.
I sort of thought it was a conglomeration of a military term that they would use the first letters to make up a word.
Oh, an acronym. No, it predates the military. The military just borrowed it from general culture. Another interesting aspect of this is many German verbs begin with the G-E. And so there’s an idea that maybe G-dunk is a combination of the English verb dunk plus the German prefix G-E. But the evidence is pretty slim on that.
And, Tom, my sense is that a geedunk was a really, really, really important factor in morale. Isn’t that right?
Correct.
Yeah, I read that the Navy during World War II commissioned a $1 million geedunk barge.
What?
Yeah, and then refrigeration ships that would carry all these things so that they would be easily available to ships. I mean, it was a really important thing, right?
Right, for morale.
Yeah, to be able to look forward to that gi-dunk. Particularly if you’re serving in hot climates.
Where did you serve, Tom?
Well, I was in Naples, Italy for two years.
Okay.
Ice cream would go over easy there, right?
Pretty much.
Yeah, I think I’d want to go ashore for pizza, though. Most anything would go over pretty good by the time we got out of there.
Tom, thank you so much for sharing these memories with us.
Thank you.
Thank you for the information.
Sounds good.
All right.
Take care.
All right.
Appreciate it.
Thanks, Tom.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
