Transcript of “Where Does “Kong” in “King Kong” Come From?”
Hi, you have A Way with Words.
Hi there, my name is Alex from Bishop, California.
Hey Alex, welcome to the show. How can we help you?
So I was wondering about Godzilla and King Kong with the movie that came out, pitting them against each other.
I was kind of wondering where some of the roots or parts of those words that are kind of in larger parlance.
You know, Godzilla, the Zilla being added to stuff, and then also the Kong, you know, with Daunte Kong or King Kong or other kind of Kongs being added around.
I’m wondering where that may have come from and, yeah, what kind of examples you guys can think of in modern language.
Let’s talk about King Kong for a second.
There has been some work done in this.
I mean, when the first movie came out in 1933, it was a huge hit.
But it wasn’t the first movie about a giant gorilla attacking people and taking the fair maiden away.
So there was some precedence to that.
And some of the suggestions that have been talked about in the many years since that movie first came out was that the Kong part is connected to Congo,
Which was sometimes used for parts of Africa and creatures in Africa before that.
So there was like a Congo eel.
And also there were other movies before 1933 that used forms of that, like Kongorilla was the name of a film before that.
And there was a Kong this and Kong that.
So we’ve got this idea of Kong and Congo, sometimes filled with the C, sometimes filled with the K, that really just was associated with Africa and the place where gorillas come from.
So, yeah, we’ve got the idea here that Marion Cooper, who was the primary producer of the film, came up with Kong just because it was kind of floating in the ether and was connected to gorillas in Africa.
Somebody says that they remember him saying he liked words with K because they were strong, but I don’t know if that’s actually accurate.
Oh, yeah. And plus you have, you know, the alliteration with King and then Kong.
Yeah, of course, the alliteration is part of it, too.
And Godzilla, I think, is a little more interesting.
There’s a word for kujira in Japanese, which means whale, and then gorira, which means gorilla in Japanese.
And if you combine those together, you get gojira, which was anglicized into Godzilla.
So G-O-G-I-R-A is a combination of Japanese words for gorilla and whale.
And then it became Godzilla in English.
And that would be the 1950s.
And what is it called when you add like the zilla to the, like a bridezilla?
Or is there a name for that?
Yeah, it’s a combining form.
And some people call it a crayon morpheme,
Meaning that the Zilla still contains some of the notion of monster
Or large monster from the original word,
But etymologically it’s not in there.
Zilla doesn’t contain anything like that.
But because of the word that it comes from,
Zilla now has this notion of, you know,
Savage beast or large monster or something that’s hard to deal with.
So that’s how you get a bride Zilla.
I see.
Or a groomzilla because they exist.
Right. Oh, yeah. No, absolutely.
Yeah, and it’s called the crayon morpheme because crayon from cranberry is also used to form words.
And crayon doesn’t contain anything etymologically having to do with cranberries.
It’s just we just think of it as being related to cranberries because that’s the word that it’s in.
Oh, that’s interesting.
Yeah.
Well, thank you so much.
And it’s interesting that these two, you know, movie larger than life characters have, you know, both had their imprint on language.
Yeah, though, we should do a whole segment on that, Martha, movies and language, because there’s just they’re so dominant in our culture.
Even now when we tend to watch them at home, they do leave a mark.
They do. That’s a really good idea.
Thank you so much, Alex, for your question. We really appreciate it.
Yeah, I appreciate your time. Thank you.
Take care.
Thanks, Alex. Bye bye.
