Little Gomer

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Asher in Burlington, Vermont.

Hi, Asher. Welcome to the show. How can we help you?

My dad, I was about three years old, and him and my mom were hanging out, and he jokingly called me a little Gomer. Gomer spelled G-O-M-E-R. And I had no idea what that was and ran into the other room crying, to which they both cracked up. And to this day, still don’t really know what Gomer is.

I was recently visiting my dad in Indiana, and he gave me a little more insight how there was a character named Gomer Pyle on the show, The Andy Griffith Show. But he still didn’t really have an explanation of where the term or the word came from. So I’m hoping maybe you can provide a little more insight.

Gomer Pyle. Boy, that really takes me back.

Yeah, right? I watch that program every single day after school.

Do his catchphrase.

Which one?

Well, golly. And he would say, shazam, too. He was just the biggest goofball. I mean, he had his own show.

Yeah, he went on to do several shows with the same character, right? This kind of rustic, rude, local yokel guy.

Yeah, Jim Neighbors. Yeah, that’s what we know about Gomer. It really pops up immediately as soon as that show hit the airwaves in 1963. And it became common slang for a stupid person, a loser, a hick, a hillbilly, somebody who didn’t know one end of a stick from the other, that sort of person. But he was good-hearted. He always prevailed in the end. But Gomer kind of lost that connotation and just kind of became a gentle derogatory term.

So my dad was calling me a bit of an idiot, but a good-hearted idiot.

Yeah, maybe. A good-hearted idiot. You hope so.

A 20-year-old. It’s a very sweet term, I think, little Gomer. It’s not very common anymore, though.

No. No, he was a big fan of the show, and that’s where he said he got it from.

Oh, he did. Okay.

All right. Yeah, you should go. You know, I actually, Asher, have the complete box set of Gomer Pile.

You do?

I do. I loved it.

Do you?

Okay. Yeah, you’ve got to check it out, Asher. This would be a good bonding experience for you.

I guess we’ve got to go watch some Gomer Pile together.

But that’s it. Yeah, Gomer. And there’s a medical use of it that is far more common now, medical slang Gomer, where everyone believes it stands for get out of my emergency room, but it doesn’t. It also comes from this fellow on the show. And if you look in, there’s an article written in the Journal of American Speech in 1989. The linguist who put that together has a really important part where he talks about Everett Greenbaum, who wrote the show, named it after a writer he knew named Gomer Kuhl.

So he named the character Gomer Pyle after Gomer Cool. And so we actually have a really nice connection there where we’ve got a solid evidence that the word came from the show. And we know where the name in the show came from, too, which is really rare for slang, incredibly rare.

So anytime doctors and medical folks bring up the Gomer that they think stands for the acronym, we’re able to confidently say, no, it does not come from that acronym, despite what you believe. And that’s somebody with a lot of complaints or physical complaints.

Yeah, just somebody who comes in and they want everything from you, all of your time, all of your resources, all of your staff. Get out of my emergency room.

Very, very interesting.

Thanks for calling.

Hey, thank you both so much.

Thank you.

Okay, take care, Asher.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

You too. Bye.

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