Lollygolly

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello. How are you? This is Roy Doyon. I’m calling from New York City today.

Hello, Roy. What’s going on?

Well, not too much. I’m working in the UN, so I’m very busy.

Oh, what are you doing there?

What do you do for the UN?

I’m a cartographer. I make maps.

Interesting.

That’s awesome. What are you making a map of today?

I was plotting potential deployment sites in Darfur today.

Oh, unhappy maps. I’m sorry. I was thinking things like…

Well, yes, most of our things are unhappy.

I work for the Department of Field Support, so we support the missions.

Still, your work actually is always struggling that cartography is a lot like the work that I do,

Which is lexicography. It requires a certain amount of tedium and meticulousness,

But you’ve got a work that will be widely used by everybody.

Well, it sounds like you could work here.

So you have a language question for us today, Roy?

Yes, I do. It’s an expression my mother used to use. The term is lolly golly.

I think she used it wrong because if we were just sort of messing around, she would say, stop lolly gollying and get to work.

And where was she from?

She was a German immigrant.

So you used the term lolly golly yourself?

Yes, I did. I used to, and I was having a conversation with my wife, and I was rushing to get to work.

I’m one of those people that’s perpetually late, and I was running down the hallway of the apartment building trying to make the commuter train.

There was a couple of people in the hallway, and I couldn’t get around them, and I actually missed the train.

But when I was relating why I missed the train to my wife, I said, well, there was these people, and they were lolly-gollying around in the hallway, and I couldn’t get around them.

And I just missed the train.

So she said, well, what does that mean?

Now, she’s English, so she maintains she speaks proper English

In that we Americans really don’t speak English.

Oh, that argument.

Yes, yes, I hear it all the time.

So she would have understood if you said somebody was dilly-dallying but not lolly-gollying?

Yes, probably what I should have said was lollygag.

But your mother didn’t say lollygag.

Your mother said lollygolly.

No, she would say stop lollygalling around.

I mean, I remember it quite well.

Now, I can’t imagine, Grant, anybody not knowing what,

Or not inferring what lollygalling would be.

Yeah, it’s not the standard.

Actually, I don’t even know that it’s any more than a family word,

But I think it’s fairly transparent.

Is it used often in that regard?

No, actually, I don’t think you’re going to find that particular form

Of the word in any dictionary.

You know, I haven’t seen lolly-golly around very much, Roy,

But I think that it falls into that great tradition of okie-dokie and razzle-dazzle,

And, you know, maybe your wife’s just being a fuddy-duddy about this.

Yes, I’m sure she is.

But look, here, Roy, I want to tell you what you should tell your wife.

The first thing is the British, their language didn’t stop changing.

When Americans came over here and settled, you know, we became Americans,

Let’s say the last 200 years, their language hasn’t been fixed in time.

It’s been changing as rapidly as ours has.

And as a matter of fact, their English has probably changed more than ours has in certain ways,

Unless, of course, in other ways.

So she doesn’t speak some kind of pure, rare version of English

That is the standard to which all other Englishes should be held to.

Hers is a bastard version off of the father tree as well.

You know what I think you should tell her, Roy?

Okay, go ahead.

I think you should say to her, give me some latitude.

Don’t you cartographers have humor like that?

Isn’t that, I mean, I don’t know.

Latitude means tolerance, absolutely.

That’s horrible, Mark.

That’s a bad pun, though.

That’s why he didn’t laugh.

He had the grace not to laugh and to encourage you in your bad puns.

I guess that went over like the proverbial lead balloon, huh, Roy?

No, no, it took a moment.

Well, Roy, thanks for an interesting question.

Oh, you’re welcome, and thank you for your insights.

And I say use lolly golly in good health, even though I never see the word.

Okay, I’ll continue to use it.

All right.

Yes, please.

Okay.

Take care.

Bye now.

Bye-bye.

So, Grant, I guess the answer to the question is that it’s not really a word,

But I have to defend Roy on that just because it makes sense to me.

Yeah, he’s fine using it, but like I said, it is a word, but it’s a family word.

And family words are words used within families and to outsiders.

Eh, they don’t make a lot of sense.

But he’s fine.

His wife is now a part of his family.

She should just adopt it and move forward.

That’s right.

If you’ve got a family word that you’d like to share or a question about language or you want to talk about making maps, give us a call, 1-877-929-9673.