Knuckleheads

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Pat Ambry from San Diego.

Hi, Pat.

Hi, Pat. Welcome to the program.

Thank you.

Hey, I was wondering, what’s the origin of the word knucklehead?

I’ve heard it applied sometimes to me.

Oh, yeah?

I’m real sure about that.

It’s not a nice thing, is it?

I don’t think so.

There’s some negative connotation in there,

Like dumb or not thinking or something like that.

Yeah, somebody who’s a little dense, right?

Yeah.

And it’s not so bad when they’re talking about somebody else, but when it refers to me, I

Go, oh, my.

Oh, my.

Now, when would that come up?

It came up probably when I was about five years old and about two weeks ago.

Okay, well, we have to ask what you did.

Well, what did I do when I was a little boy?

I’m not sure.

But what I did just the other day was I didn’t carry something through to completion.

Yeah.

The guy said, well, that knucklehead over there.

Yeah, it’s an insult, but it’s not too offensive, right?

It’s something you can kind of take and accept, right?

Being called a knucklehead isn’t going to make you upset?

Well, it did make me upset.

Oh, did it?

I was meant to hurt my feelings.

Oh, okay.

Oh, hurt your feelings.

But when you’re five, pretty much all five-year-old boys are knuckleheads, right?

I’m raising a knucklehead of my own.

And it changes when?

Actually, it doesn’t.

I once had a roommate that said that all young men should be frozen solid from like the age of 10 to 22.

So knuckleheadedness does not go away.

There’s an interesting story behind this, Pat.

Often when we talk about word origins, we always stress that there’s a point of coinage,

That is when the word was created, and then there’s a point of popularity,

Which is when it kind of burst through and really started to show how strong it was

And people started to use it everywhere.

And knucklehead is one of those terms.

You can find it used as far back as 1890

In a bit of short fiction published in Bedford’s magazine out of New York.

It’s fiction targeted at young men.

And you can find it again by 1916.

But knucklehead really didn’t take off until the 1940s during World War II.

Get this.

The U.S. Army had a comic character, you know, in cartoons by the name of R.F. Knucklehead.

He was always doing the wrong thing in airplanes and on the airfield.

As long as a pilot didn’t do what RF Knucklehead did,

Then he was probably a good pilot.

So this guy, this character was doing things like looking at a map while he was flying,

And obviously it was covering his field of vision,

Or he was walking away from his airplane after landing and leaving it unguarded,

Which is not something you would do in a time of war.

And so you can find copies of these cartoons in Life magazine in 1942,

And they’re online in Google Books.

And just really, it’s funny stuff.

And you can see how this little, he looks goofy,

He’s got a goofy face, a goofy walk,

And he doesn’t look like a regular fellow.

You can see how this RF knucklehead

Might have come to popularity,

Particularly when you read the accompanying text,

And you can see there that the army

Plastered this little guy everywhere.

He was in films, he was in books and magazines and posters,

And the whole idea was to kind of approach

These do’s and don’ts from a funny angle

So that the message would stick.

But did his head look like a knuckle?

No, it did not look like a knuckle.

So, Pat, that’s where most of us first heard of Knucklehead from this character, RF Knucklehead.

And like I said, we’ll link to this stuff and put it online.

He’s a funny-looking fellow, and it’s interesting to see this military approach

Because you think of the military as being this strict organization

Where everything is like a command from your CO and, you know, there’s no humor there.

But in this case, they put some humor there.

But in any case, so what do you think, Pat?

World War II slang still alive?

I’m going to come over and check out the cartoon.

Yeah, yeah, sure.

Look for it in Google Books.

Life Magazine 1942.

We’ll link to it as well from the website.

Thank you very much.

I appreciate this.

It’s our pleasure.

Bye.

Bye-bye.

Knucklehead.

I use knucklehead all the time, but I use it as the mildest of insults,

A kind of thing that you might say somebody to their face.

You knucklehead, you can’t do that.

Something like that.

Did somebody call you something and you’re not quite sure how offensive it is?

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