Need a Little Walking Around Geetus?

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Sheila.

Hi, Sheila. Where are you calling us from?

From Charlotte, North Carolina.

Oh, wonderful. Well, welcome to the show, Sheila. What can we do for you?

I called regarding my father. He’s deceased. Were he alive? He’d be 103 today.

And as a kid growing up, he used to always ask us, did we need an EGIDAS, which was the term he used for money.

And then he went on with his nieces and nephews, his grands, my nieces and nephews.

And he would always ask them as they were leaving, do you need any Gitas?

And we don’t know the origin of that word or how that became money for him.

Well, that’s pretty generous of him.

Did you need Gitas?

Oh, from time to time.

And even if you said no, he would still give it to you.

Oh, there we go.

What a sweetheart.

That’s a good fellow, yeah.

G-E-T-U-S, something like that?

I guess. I don’t know. He was from Alabama, so it was said with a pretty thick southern accent.

But I’m listening to your accent. You’re not originally from North Carolina, are you?

I grew up in Chicago.

Yeah, I can hear that in your vowels.

Yeah, Giedis, you’re not the only one who can’t really decide how to spell it.

I’ve got four or five different spellings here. G-E-E-D-U-S is one of the spellings.

G-E-E-T-U-S, G-E-E-T-I-S, G-E-E-T-A-S, sometimes G-H-E-E-T-U-S, and then sometimes people just say geets.

Give me some geets. I mean, give me some money.

The origin of it is lost to mystery, like a lot of slang, but I have a little theory that I want to share with you.

And you can see what you think. You can judge it for me and see if you think it’s worthy.

When digging up the origin of this term, I discovered two interesting facts.

One is a lot of the early uses of it come from California, which is very strange.

Many, many of them in the 1920s just show up in California newspapers.

One of my favorite quotations actually showed up in a Eureka, California newspaper from 1923.

And there’s this columnist who went by the pen name of Hector, H-E-C-K hyphen T-O-R.

It’s this slangy, anonymous columnist, and he wrote mostly about gambling and gamblers.

So as you can imagine, his writing was wild.

He wrote, in one of his columns, he wrote,

One of the town pool room sharks maintains that he is sanitary the year round because somebody sends him to the cleaners every Saturday night.

But that makes no never mind with us.

We know that as long as he is out of Gitas, he is also out of soap.

And I just think that’s funny.

They send him to the cleaners, meaning that they take him for all his money.

And all of his columns are like that.

And he used it in a few newspapers.

So that’s interesting to me that it might have been a Western term.

But a little earlier than that, it shows up twice in a newspaper in Atchison, Kansas in 1920, where somebody is said to have the Giedis.

And they call it a malady.

I was going to say.

Yeah, but they don’t really say what it is.

They say W.P. Wagner has the Giedis.

The Giedis is the malady which made Judge Jackson’s rooster famous.

I’ve never heard of Judge Jackson’s rooster, so I don’t know why it was famous.

And I couldn’t figure out who Judge Jackson was or anything about the rooster.

And then a day later in the same paper, in the same column, W.P. Wagner, colon,

The Giedis is not serious, but very inconvenient.

I don’t know.

I don’t know what the Giedis is.

But I’m thinking, you know, Martha, you probably are thinking what I’m thinking.

There’s all these terms talking about your knot of bills.

You know, we talk about the knot or the bankroll, the roll of money, your cabbage roll.

And I’m just wondering if Wagner’s Giedis was like a goiter or something, you know, or a boil, you know, maybe on his bum or derriere.

And maybe Giedis might refer to your bankroll or your roll of money.

And so both of these refer to a knot or bump or roll or something.

It’s about a knot of something.

I don’t know.

Just a theory.

It’s very loosey-goosey based only upon those few appearances of the word.

Yeah, I think I was thinking just Giedis, you know, something that you get.

Yeah, that’s what Jonathan Green, the slang mexicographer’s theory is.

But that’s just simply based on just the phonetic similarity.

There’s absolutely no citation evidence for that, though.

Well, that’s interesting.

We always kind of wonder.

He was in the Navy in World War II.

And we wondered if the origin came from his travels that way.

He may have picked it up there.

It’s certainly slangy.

Yeah, and people in the Navy pick up all kinds of new language from,

You know, you encounter so many new people from around the country when you’re in the Navy, so you’ve got a lot of new language that way.

Right, and you’d spend your Gitas on the Gidunk.

That’s right.

On the ice cream, right?

Yeah.

Well, Sheila, in other words, we don’t know.

Yeah, I’ll hold out for more information.

It’s one of those terms you kind of put on your list of, boy, I’d like to know more.

And occasionally a new database will go online or a whole big batch of newspapers will be digitized.

And I’ll look it up again and see what I can find.

Thank you so much.

All right, take care.

Bye-bye.

-huh.

If you know what made Judge Jackson’s rooster famous, do let us know.

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