Gee Whiz and Gee Whillikers, Your Slang is Old

Hi there, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, good morning.

Hello.

This is Rodrigo Ortega.

Where are you calling from?

Tucson, Arizona.

What’s on your mind today?

You know, when I first came to the States about 30-some years ago, I decided that I wanted to fit in. So I left Mexico, came to Denver, Colorado, and I looked for a book to help me use slang. Because I wanted to be like a cool guy. I was 22 years at the time. And I started using the slang. Believe it or not, there was a book for slang. And I didn’t check the date on the book.

So I’m walking around, going to the bar, finding a cute girl and telling her, gee whiz, you’re beautiful. I never noticed that the book was written in 1945. So all my slang was a little out of date. So I found myself, well, actually everybody looked at me and I thought it was my accent. And it turned out that it was the slang I was using because it was never appropriate. I used all kinds of multiple slangs until somebody says, where are you getting these words from? I said, well, I got this full book. And they said, have you checked the date?

I’m like, oh, I felt like I was traveling back in time, like back to the future, you know? So I’m curious where that geek whiz came from. I’m just imagining some women might be charmed by that, by a man using old-fashioned slang.

Yeah, you’re the cat’s pajamas.

Well, it kind of worked, but maybe not the way I intended.

Yeah.

Yeah, G-Wiz is old, though. It’s much older than that. I was wondering if your slang dictionary was from the 1860s, because that’s how old G-Wiz is.

Oh, my God. You know, and then I said, where did I come from that one? You know, and they were unusual books. It happened that my father in Mexico had an extensive library, and I found that in the library in my home, and that’s where I took it from. But I never thought that, you know, slides kind of changed with times.

Oh, yeah, it changes every generation, or more often than that even. There are a whole bunch of terms like gee whiz that begin with gee, but gee whiz itself probably is a shortening of an older one, gee whittaker, which has got a lot of forms, including gee willigans. And that is probably a form of using Jerusalem as a very mild swear word or mild imprecation or by Jerusalem.

And all of these are what are known as minced oaths, which we’ve talked about on the show before. And minced oaths are about swearing but not swearing. You don’t want to say something truly offensive. So you find a way to get that urge to swear out of your system without actually swearing. So you try not to take the, you know, God’s name or Jesus’s name in vain. So you say something else that’s similar but isn’t that.

So, gee whiz sounds a little like the beginning of Jesus. You know, it sounds a little bit like the G in God.

Oh, okay. Well, that kind of makes sense.

So, what do you say now when you see a beautiful woman in Rodrigo?

I say, hello, honey, I’m home.

Hello, honey, I’m home. If I say anything else, I’ll be trouble.

Well done.

Well done. Yes, you’ll appreciate that. Give our best to the beautiful woman at home, and thank you so much for calling.

I appreciate you guys. Love your show. Thanks for having me.

Bye.

Take care of yourself.

Thanks, Rodrigo.

You’re probably thinking right now, gee whiz, I should call Martin Grant. And gee golly, you should. 877-929-9673. And if you’re not in the United States, that number works in Canada. It’s toll-free there, too.

And if you’re somewhere else outside of North America, including Mexico, gee, have we got lots of ways to reach us. You can find them all on our website at waywordradio.org/contact.