The Counter-deception Blog

By jingo! These diabolical tricks can hardly be coincidence.

And if that doesn't work, we'll hit them with the Hopefully Bomb.

Dear Word Detective: All the recent war talk brought the word "jingoists" to mind. My dictionary tells me it's from a British political song supporting the use of force in Russia in 1878. Clear enough, except who is this "Jingo"? And why should he become a label for what we now call "hawks"? Can you explain further, or should we send in the troops? -- Barney Johnson, Director of Theatre Facilities, St. Norbert College, De Pere, WI.

No, you can tell the troops to go sit down. Most people don't know this (and those who do are busy trying to forget), but I am the inventor of the world's first Grammar-Based Defensive Confusion System (GBDCS). Should our country be invaded, my GBDCS will spring into action and automatically switch each and every "that" in print in North America to "which" (and vice versa). This diabolical trick will embroil the invaders in endless grammatical squabbles among themselves, rendering them, if not utterly powerless, at least very, very tired.

It's appropriate, given the hall of mirrors quality (some would say "smoke and mirrors") of the news lately, that the term "jingo" should have begun life as a magician's incantation. The earliest written instances of "jingo" (around 1670) report it as a exclamation routinely used by conjurors who shouted "Hey jingo!" when making an object appear (as opposed to "Hey presto!" when they made something vanish). "Jingo" probably arose as a euphemism for "Jesus," much as "Gosh" and "Golly" started out as substitutes for "God." The expression "By jingo!" was very popular from the 17th through the 19th centuries.

The "superpatriot" sense of "jingo" does indeed date back to the British-Russian confrontation over Turkey in 1878. A popular music hall anthem of the day penned by G.W. Hunt declared: "We don't want to fight, yet by Jingo if we do, we've got the ships, we've got the men, and got the money too!" Those favoring a war with Russia (which was, fortunately, avoided) became known as "The Jingoes," and the term "jingo" has ever since been a synonym for a blustering, bellicose "patriot."