Gert or Gertie as a Nickname for the Women in Your Life

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, how are you today?

My name is Lana, and I’m calling from southern Indiana in Evansville.

Evansville, right there on the border.

Yes, we’re right down by Kentucky.

Right on the Ohio River. What’s on your mind today?

Oh, it’s a name, Gert or Gertie or Gertrude sometimes.

Used as like a term of endearment.

All the women in our family, we call each other Gert or Gertie or, hey, I got to thinking about this because, oh, a couple of years ago, a coworker of mine, I think she called her mom Gertie or I was calling my mom Gertie or something. And we realized that both of our families used that, just the women, to call the other women in the family. They called each other Gertie.

So we both thought it was kind of weird, and I wanted to know if that was a thing, if Gertie is a term that people use, and we just didn’t know it.

Gertie is a term of endearment.

Grant, shall we tell on you?

Yeah.

I’ve mentioned this on the show before, but when I was growing up, I was one of five kids in my family. And, you know, as kids do, we just had one of these goofy conversations about what each of us would have been named had we been born a different sex.

And my siblings decided that if I had been born a girl, I would have been called Gertrude. And so for years, my younger sister, who’s five years younger than me, called me Gertie for a long time. She just called me Gertie.

And I never really minded all that much.

But it’s so it’s so weird, Atlanta to hear you talk about this Gertie meet Gertie yeah it’s so interesting to hear this and so this is just kind of like a generic name for other other women in your life it’s not when you’ve done something old-fashioned like because Gertrude is kind of an old-fashioned name it’s not something when you’ve done something kind of fussy or or antiquey or anything like that?

No, it’s just a general name. Basically, it’s almost like when people say, hey man, or something like that. That’s exactly what you’re making me think of. You’re reminding me of during the war, World War II, when Joe was just a generic name for an American soldier.

A lot of people who didn’t speak English might be able to shout to American soldiers, hey Joe, because just Joe was considered a common name for an American GI.

And there’s Mac is sometimes used in the same way.

Hey, Mac, just to mean guy or buddy or pal.

And we’ve had a few of these, but Gertie is a new one for me.

I love it.

And, you know, there have been other Gerties, a slangy Gerties, but none of them are very nice.

They’re all kind of naughty.

Dirty Gertie in the 20s through the 40s was slang for a sexually forthright woman, you know, a promiscuous woman.

And there were, during World War II, there were old cargo boats turned into fuel tankers were known as Dirty Gerties.

And if you go to bingo, you know how they have those funny rhymes where the numbers will rhyme with a little ditty?

Do you ever do bingo?

Well, I don’t particularly, but I’m in a community where bingo is a very big thing.

Well, if you go, you might hear the bingo caller say, Dirty Gertie, number 30, if 30 is one of the numbers that comes up.

And then there was the big hit song in 1943, Dirty Gertie from Buzzerdi.

And it has a lot of naughty lyrics that never really made it into the official song, but it was played on the radio.

But some of the lyrics that I can say on the air, I’ll go something like, Dirty, girty from Buzzerdi, hit a mousetrap neath her skirty, strapped it to her kneecap purdy, baited it with flirty flirty.

Just Buzzerdi, by the way, is a town in, I believe it’s in Tunisia now.

But Gertrude is pretty much an old fashioned name.

But I just love this little thing that you’ve got going on.

And I wonder if the rest of our listeners or any of our other listeners have this same thing with Gertie or another name where it’s just kind of like the little kind of group nickname for everybody else.

Well, Gertie, if there are other Gerties out there who call each other Gertie, we’re going to hear about it.

They’re going to call Gertie and me.

Yeah, well, we’re interested in people whose name isn’t Gertrude or Gertie.

If it’s just kind of a little nickname that you give each other, let us know, and then we’ll share it with the world.

We’ll find out more about this, Lana, okay?

Awesome.

Thank you so much.

All right.

Take care.

Be well.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Take care, Kurt.

All right.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

Bye, Kurt.

Bye-bye.

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