#319 Widget

America, Ya Gotta Love It #319 Widget
The other day when I was writing about the word wedgie I mentioned how many people over the age of 65 were unfamiliar with the term. That of course got me to thinking. From whence cometh the word wedgie. The simplest explanation is most likely the best, it derives from the action of forcing a clothing wedge up the valley created by the twin mountains of the buttocks. I like to pronounce it B-you-tox cause it sounds more genteel than the crass but-tox. Still Buttocks always sounds like some place in a large western state: Yep I’m from Buttocks, Montana. The wedge that’s driven up is, to be sure, not the hard and impermeable wedge one would use to, say, split wood, but rendered accurately a wedgie can feel like it’s doing similar damage The etymological dictionary defines wedgie as coming from the—
O.E. wecg “a wedge,” from P.Gmc. *wagjaz (cf. O.N. veggr, M.Du. wegge, Du. wig, O.H.G. weggi “wedge,” Ger. Weck “wedge-shaped bread roll”), { Okay...} The verb is recorded from 1440. “Wedgie” in the underwear prank sense is attested by 1970s. “Wedge issue” is attested from 1999.
Cool, “wedge issue,” a new permutation of an old theme—he has a wedge issue. So much more genteel than he has a wedgie. It’s comforting somehow knowing that there are even now academicians patrolling the perimeters of our language researching the first recorded instances of people using words like wedgie. We have certainly progressed beyond the “have to spend all our time just finding food and shelter” phase of human development.
A similar word crossed my path recently as well. The word squeegee. Squeegee is a great word, not less so because it was invented. At some point someone must have put it in my spell check because it doesn’t cause a squiggly line. But the other day when I was squeegee-ing my shower I thought, wait a minute, that’s not very grammatical. What are the verb forms of squeegee? Because for gosh sakes we have reached the point where we do squeegee something just like gol durnit, we Xerox something. A word has arrived when it started as a noun and now everyone uses it as a verb. Therefore I elect to shorten the difficult construction squeegee in its verb form to squeege. The verb “to squeege.” I squeeged the shower Honey. Did you squeege the window dear? No but I intend to squeege it later on. Have you been squeeging it lately? I squeeged it just last week. So it’s squeeged then? It has been squeeged good. Yeah, well squeege this. You know what they say, if you can’t dry em, squeege em. Is this toilet paper wet? No, Honey don’t squeege the Charmin...
America, ya gotta love it.