When I argue I see shapes

[venta]

I'm curious. About words again.
Today's word on the Calendar is gelt.
I'm not going to tell you what it means, I want you to answer or guess. maviscruet is banned from entering, because he's got his own Calendar to tell him the answer ;)

[Poll #407297]

Yesterday's word was ullapse, meaning "an explanation when anything goes wrong". As Felix points out, next time you're explaining why something's gone wrong, you can be safe in the knowledge that it's not just an excuse, it's an ullapse. Disappointingly, he also tells me it isn't in the OED, though :(

According to the Calendar, gelt is "a lunatic; adopted from the Irish geilt, a mad or frenzied person".

I was familiar with it as a slang term for money, but was unsure whether this was just a few people borrowing freely from German. I believe Lovejoy (in the Jonathon Gash novels, which are very much superior to the TV series) uses it a lot to mean money.

The OED, he say (in summary):
1. noun, rare. A lunatic.
2. Money; in early use often with reference to the pay of a (German)
army; now only slang.
3. Gelded, castrated. lit. and fig.
4.obs. form of GELD n., GUILT.
5. var. GILT, young sow.

I think it sounds like it ought to be an insult. "Bring that back here, you shameless thieving gelt!"

Comments

[zotz]

Actually, I was right, in that that's one of five meanings the OED has for gelt.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Five !?

Any chance you could mail me the business end of the OED entry (I don't have access :( ).

(venta@livejournal would work)

[wimble.livejournal.com]

Already done it!

[venta.livejournal.com]

Thanks.

[zotz]

Me too.

[verlaine.livejournal.com]

Yeah - I've just done a quick Google and my suspicion now is that all the relatively plausible guesses that people have come up with so far will prove reasonably correct :-/

[beckyl.livejournal.com]

My answer comes from both Danish/Scandawegian/Anglo-Saxon context and Yiddish/Hebrew. No idea if there's an actual modern(ish) English context for it.

Now I'll have a look at other people's answers.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Well, bear in mind that my Calendar is notionally "forgotten English", so it doesn't need to be very modern.

Depends how ish your ish was, really :)
For reference, the citation for gelt that the Calendar gives is a dictionary published in 1901.

[beckyl.livejournal.com]

Well, I appear to have the same context as most other people answering.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Well, quite a lot of the words on the Calendar haven't been forgotten by me. Up til now I've been putting this down to the the Calendar being American, and them having forgotten different words from us.

In this case, however, it's fair because the forgotten instance of the word doesn't mean what you think it means :)

[venta.livejournal.com]

Patience, dear child. Give people a chance to guess first!

[beckyl.livejournal.com]

Apology offered if this isn't a good thing?

[mejoff.livejournal.com]

yiddish and hebrew are, hilariously enough, almost entirely unrelated. Yiddish is mostly german.

[beckyl.livejournal.com]

I did know this, but I couldn't remember which linguistic root the word had, given both languages were in simultaneous use on the occaision when I came across it.

Collected logophiles of venta's journal - what does "Meshuggah" relate to in German then, being about the only bit of (probably) Yiddish I can currently drag to mind?

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

Actually, that one's from the Hebrew !

[mejoff.livejournal.com]

along with the other, like, three words we kept as we spread like a dreidle spinning messiah martyring cancer through europe!

Memories Jangled

[marjory.livejournal.com]

This is oddly illuminating for me (the meaning of gelt=crazy) as my grandparents (Scottish)used an awful lot of words in daily speech which only subsequent education demonstrated to me were not in standard English usage. One of these was 'Geit/gyte', which meant crazy/mad/funny as in '... the dog's gone geit...'.

Blimey! You live and learn...

[marjory.livejournal.com]

There's also the German word 'geil', which means:

1) great smashing super etc. to a superlative extent, beyond belief
2) lustful, horny etc. (geilhaft=lustful)

Gotta love those adjectives/adverbs!