Lars Eighner's Homepage Writers' Workshop Glossary: G

G

gamut / gauntlet / gantlet [mistaken]

Gamut and gauntlet can fill in the blank in "run the ________," but both the words and the phrases have distinctive meanings. Gantlet is merely a variant spelling of one of the senses of gauntlet. Gamut means a whole range of similar things, originally musical notes. To run the gamut, then, is to exercise the whole range of something. Often the something is human emotions. This phrase is the only common use of the word, and the idiom is now a cliché best avoided. Gauntlet is two words. One, originally spelled gantlet means a glove. This is the gauntlet that is always being thrown down to symbolize a challenge. The other gauntlet is an ordeal which commonly took the form of passing between files of one's peers who administered blows as one passed. This running the gauntlet might be an initiation or a punishment. Running the gauntlet, then, is being exposed to a series of trials or risks. From this gauntlet a more recent sense has emerged in which the gauntlet is a double or single file of people such as a receiving line or honor guard. Like gamut, gauntlet most commonly occurs in clichés.

`gen·der /'dZEndR/ noun [disputed]

Genders originally were classes of nouns. In European languages, nouns for things which could reasonably considered to have sex tended to fall into a gender with things of like sex, but so, too, did nouns for many things which could not be considered to belong to any sex, and sometimes nouns for sexual parts ended up in a gender usually associated with the opposite sex. European languages often had the genders masculine, feminine, and neuter, but inclusion of nouns in the genders was often arbitrary and even when words had something to do with sex, the classification by gender was often inconsistent or illogical. As the study of language progressed, genders based on size or shape or other qualities were discovered in non-European languages, although again the assignment of nouns to genders was often arbitrary, inconsistent, and illogical. So the loose association of gender and sex seems to have been mostly and accident in European languages, but English is a European language, so it is not too surprising that English speakers came to think that gender had something to do with sex.

Gender has been used as euphemism for sex for more than a century, and when used precisely this way it is not a recent coinage in the cause of political correctness, but was a Victorian strategy to avoid using the offensive word "sex." In recent times, anthropologists and other social scientists have found it useful to distinguish gender and sex: sex being the biological condition of being (usually) either male or female, and gender referring to the culturally assigned characteristics or roles usually associated with sex. For example, in some cultures, planting and harvesting is men's work and in other cultures it is women's work. Since there is no real issue of biological sex involved, the difference is one of gender. This distinction seems useful in the fields in which it originated, but it is valuable only in so far as it makes a distinction between gender and sex, and the use of gender as delicate euphemism when nothing other than sex is meant cannot be justified today.

,glos·so`la·li·a /,glAsoU'leIli@/ noun

The speaking of apparent words and syllables which are nonsense in all known human languages : speaking in tongues, the gift of tongues; often taken as a sign of religious possession. Compare: xenoglossy (usage) xenoglossy refers to speaking an existing (or sometimes a historic) human language (although the speaker supposedly does not know the language) and is usually found in contexts of spiritualism, channeling, and reincarnation; in glossolalia the utterances cannot be identified as belonging to any known human language and glossolalia is usually found in contexts referring to practices of various Christian sects.

`goth·ic /'gATIk/ noun or adjective

(sometimes capitalized)

1 : (printing) Most lay people think gothic is an ornate, old-fashioned type style such as Black Letter or Old English. However, in printing gothic means nearly the opposite: a sans serif style, usually with thick strokes. Good examples of gothic fonts are not available in many graphical browsers. A gothic font available in most word processors is Helvetica.
2 : (genre) A genre of fiction usually involving gloomy or isolated settings; dreary, spooky old houses or castles; mysterious, bizarre, or macabre -- possibly supernatural -- occurrences; and secretive, suspicious characters. A subgenre is Southern gothic usually centering on a moldering Ante Bellum mansion and featuring unexorcised evils of slavery, the Civil War, racism, actual or suggested incest or other sexual aberrations, insanity, and often an elderly Afro-American woman who is the embodiment of long-suffering goodness and wisdom.

Mrs. `Grun·dy /'mIsIz 'gr@ndi/ proper noun

(literature) a character who never actually appears in the play Speed the Plough by Thomas Morton (1579?-1647). Mrs. Grundy evidently is a very priggish, judgmental person and a gossip for the character Mrs. Ashfield often worries "What will Mrs. Grundy say?" Mrs. Grundy has done service since in many contexts and common expressions, and in particular as a very strict teacher of very conventional English grammar in the writings of Edwin Newman (1919-) and other commentators on English grammar and usage.