Probably it would not be a mistake to assume that today’s word of the day would, at first, recall associations with Lady Gaga.
The popular artist was definitely in the spotlights last weeks, from her Oscars outfit and amazing performance to this weekend’s charity jumping into Chicago’s Lake Michigan freezing waters.
Indeed, Lady Gaga has pulled some pretty gaga acts over the years. And they correspond pretty well to the different meaning of the term gaga. As some are easy to describe as silly and foolishly crazy, others as excessively enthusiastic or fond and third just went too far away to be labelled as senile and dotty.
Though the pop star got her artistic name from Queen’s Radio Ga Ga song, she is, indeed, just as colourful and multifaceted as her pseudonym suggests.
The word gaga, in the meaning of dotty, comes from 19th century French to describe the speech of a baby by doubling “ga” from words like gâteux (senile) or gâtisme (doting person).
In the French language encyclopedic dictionary Le Petit Larousse, published in 1905, the meaning of the word gaga is explained as Homme tombé en enfance (A man fallen in his second childhood).
With other words, human life begins and ends in a gaga mode, not to mention the gaga steps on the way (as for example infatuated love and foolish enthusiasm).
Right after its official inclusion in the French encyclopedic dictionary, the colloquial adjective gaga was adopted in the German and English languages, with the first official written reference in English coming from the same year. On 18th March, the London Daily Chronicle published a review on the London theatre scene: “Ah, you English,…..you like to laugh—ga-ga!.. Is not that the pathetic cry of our present drama, Ga-ga!”
In the following decades we can find the word been used in the sense of both – senile decay of old men and silly behaviour.
1921, Maurice Baring Passing By: “Sir Arthur is quite gaga and took me for George the whole evening”. And Edna Ferber Show Boat, 1926: “Nola darling, you’ve just gone gaga, that’s all. What do you mean by staying down there in that wretched malarial heat!”
In the modern English vocabularly – the term gaga is mostly used in the idiom to go gaga over (to receive positively or react with excessive enthusiasm). And we hope that our readers will go gaga over our word of the day series.
