Dylan from Charlottesville, Virginia, was rock climbing at his brother’s bachelor party when he heard other climbers called gumbies. Dylan figured that a gumby must be the kind of beginner or overconfident participant whose skills don’t quite match their ambition, much like what he and his fellow skateboarders call kooks. Skateboarding enthusiasts borrowed the word kook from surfers who use it to mean “beginner” or, in some places, “a non-surfer.” Kook has been part of surfing slang since the 1920s. The Cardiff Kook is an oft-decorated statue of a surfer in the seaside town of Cardiff, California. The etymology of this type of kook is uncertain, but it may be a shortening of cuckoo or come from a Hawaiian word for “poop.” In The Climbing Dictionary (Bookshop|Amazon), longtime climber Matt Samet asserts that climbers adopted the term gumby in the 1980s after actor and comedian Eddie Murphy based one of his goofy Saturday Night Live characters on the well-meaning but awkward Claymation figure Gumby from a 1950s cartoon. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Why Climbers Call Beginners “Gumbies””
Hi.
You have A Way with Words.
Hey.
My name’s Dylan.
I’m calling from Charlottesville, Virginia.
I was, recently rock climbing with my brother and some of his friends at his bachelor party, and they had a lot of new words.
And the one that I caught was most interesting to me was they called some of the other climbers gumbies.
Sounded like they’ve you know, I I’m not a climber.
I’m a skateboarder.
So gumbies, it kinda sounded to me like, you know, kooks or posers.
It was what they were seem to be using it like, but I’m not sure really where it’s from or really what it means.
Oh, yeah.
It’s funny that you should connect those gumbies and kooks because they do represent two or three different kinds of worlds.
And but at slang, they kind of do address this notion of the noob or the beginner or the overconfident participant, somebody whose skills don’t really match their ambition, if you know what I mean.
Yeah.
So tell us aboutso you’re from the skateboarding world, so you use kooks.
Does that sound like a kook to you?
How I described it?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Like, somebody who’s overconfident and then, you know, maybe plays up how good they are, dresses more than they skate.
Oh, yeah.
They wear the gear.
Right.
It so the cool thing about kook is that it comes from surfing.
There’s like a lot of skateboarding things since skateboarding was made popular by California surfers.
So some of that long standing surf language is still used today in skateboarding.
And in surfing, kook pretty much has the same definition, although it’s, it changes a little bit from here to there.
And sometimes, the kooks are just anybody who doesn’t surf, not necessarily the newbies trying to surf.
And it’s got an unknown origin, Could be from Hawaiian word meaning poop, or it could be from a shortening of cuckoo, meaning crazy.
And it might have been reinforced by Ed Cookie Burns from the TV show 77 Sunstrip, but we don’t really know.
Yeah, just up the road from us in Cardiff, California, there’s the Cardiff Cooke.
It’s this famous statue of this guy on a surfboard.
Yeah, and they always decorate it seasonally.
But Gumby, also, we do know more about Gumby, Gumby from climbing, and you will find a good entry for that in Matt Samet’s climbing dictionary, which is kind of like the reference for climbing Samet, S A M E T.
And it comes from this 1950s, 60s animated character who was kind of vaguely human shaped, but in his manner was kind of a gee whiz golly kind of wholesome kid.
And he’s constantly getting to scrapes, but wholesome scrapes, you know, like eating too much or falling off a ladder when trying to rescue a cat, things like that.
I think it really didn’t come from the show directly.
It came from Eddie Murphy during a parody of Gumby on Saturday Night Live in the 1980s, where he just kind of does Gumby as a, behind the scenes character rather than as, like, the kind of goofy animated face that you’d see in animated shorts.
So it’s a, he kind of doesn’t really have kind of a lot of self awareness.
Yeah.
And his sidekick I remember this show.
And his sidekick was Pokey.
A horse named Pokey.
Yeah.
I was gonna say that that’s what I would be if I work rock climbing.
I’d be poke a pokey.
So, yeah, so Gumpy Gumpy has a long history, at least forty years in the climbing world.
Wow, that’s a long time to have that slang.
Coop goes back to about the 1920s.
So quite a ways.
Where were they using it in the 1920s?
Surfing.
Yeah, surfing has been around.
You can find surfing being talked about in periodicals from the late 1800s.
Surfing has been a thing in Hawaii, of course, forever, but then made it into other countries and cultures by the late 1800s, especially United States and Australia.
Well, Dylan, thank you so much for calling.
Absolutely.
Thanks for answering my question.
I hope you all have a great rest of your day.
Thanks, Dylan.
Take care.
You too.
Bye bye.
Bye bye.
Bye.
