When the latest season of Glee began in April, an article heralding the first episode said, "Good things come to Gleeks who wait."
This collapsing of Glee and geek into a single word to describe diehard fans of the musical comedy-drama is not new. What surprised me, on a coincidental first reading of British critic Ivor Brown's 1942 book A Word in Your Ear, is that "gleek" has a history independent of Glee.
As early as 1540, gleek referred to a jest, trick or stinging joke – what might today be called a snap or comic insult. "They durst not fight ne strike/ They feared of a gleke," said The Image of Ipocrysy, a 1540 poem attributed to English poet John Skelton.
The word was used for another three centuries, but by the 1900s had faded into a source of nostalgia. "Why has gleek for jest, both verb and noun, so largely disappeared?" Brown wrote. "It is curt and expressive." He cites a passage from Shakespeare's Henry V, in which Gower says to Pistol, "I have seen you gleeking and galling at this gentleman twice or thrice." Brown observed: "There is some punning point there, because the episode includes the compulsion to eat a leek."
Nobody is sure where gleek came from. Another sense of the word, referring to a card game, derived from Old French glic, but the gleek as joke may just have been a variation on glee. Another theory is that it's connected to glaik, which in the early 1500s meant a dirty trick. To give a person the glaiks was to swindle him.
There is little glee in the financial travails of Greece, but word play continues regardless. Consider Grexit, which sounds like an online brokerage or a hair dye for greying men, but is in fact short for Greek exit.
The earliest reference I could find was in a Feb. 6 Globe article by Michael Babad, who attributed the term to Citigroup: "Citigroup analysts are warning of the rising threat of Greece leaving the euro zone, so much so that they've dubbed it Grexit." The term has caught on. "While the odds of a Grexit have risen," said the May 18 Weekly Market Insight report from the bank CIBC, "we are not there yet."
The coining of Grexit must seem a cruel trick of fate to two Indian entrepreneurs who a couple of years ago devised GrexIt (upper-case i), an application which, according to a 2010 article in India's PluGGd in, "lets you do a very simple thing with your Google apps account – share e-mail with colleagues." Or, with a lower-case i, rattle the financial stability of the world. GrexIt must feel it is being glaiked.
Sometimes the best way to avoid confusion is to change a name. Last month's obituary of Canadian crop scientist Dave Mallough noted his role in making rapeseed oil easier to consume through the hybridization of rape, a member of the mustard family. In 1978, in part concerned about rape's association with sexual assault, Canada's oil-seed industry replaced the word with a new coinage, "canola," formed from can (Canada), o (Latin oleum, oil) and l.a. (low acid).
But why, you might ask, was the plant called rape in the first place? It is a close relative of the turnip. The Latin word for turnip was rapum (feminine rapa). By contrast, the rape as sexual violation derives from the Latin rapere, to seize and carry off, a sense familiar from the phrase rape and pillage.
Turnip was coined in the 1500s from turn (apparently reflecting its rounded shape) and neep, the Old English word for turnip. Neep derived from the classical Latin napus, turnip. Oddly, however, the turnip bears the Latin classification Brassica rapa, while rape, from rapum, bears the classification Brassica napus.
Once again, the language has been bopped on the head with a gleek club.