Nicolle Wallace on MSNBC this afternoon: “The gig is up.”
Complicating matters: there’s a documentary film titled The Gig Is Up (2021). But that title, about the so-called gig economy, is a pun on jig. In 2021 Grammarphobia looked at the jig is up and the gig is up.
Google’s Ngram Viewer shows jig as overwhelming leading gig in print in all its varieties of English. I think it’s safe to say that Wallace meant jig. Oh, by the way, she was commenting on new news about Jack Smith’s investigation and a disgraced former president’s ever-increasing peril.
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Coincidence: Yesterday Fran Drescher said “The jig is up” in her powerful SAG-AFTRA speech (1:56 in the shorter video, 5:47 in the longer one). Every union should have a leader like Fran Drescher.
Thursday, July 13, 2023
Jigs and gigs
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comments: 4
That's interesting - those are two words which would never occur to me to confuse in UK English!
Over here, jig is a kind of dance (and also some specialised carpentry-type meanings emerging for example in a jig-saw being a particular type of saw for cutting out funny shapes), whereas a gig is either a musical event (eg "The Laughing Hyenas did a gig at the Pig and Whistle pub last night") or by extension any kind of small job (hence "the gig economy" consisting of things like delivery jobs paid on a per-item basis).
According to sundry online soutces (of nknown reliability)
jig (n.) "lively, irregular dance," 1560s, of uncertain origin. Perhaps from Middle English gigge "fiddle" (mid-15c.), from Old French gigue "fiddle," also the name of a kind of dance.
gig seems to have emerged in the 1920s either Middle English gigg, gigge, gygge (“spinning object; a top”) or else derived from the word “engagement” by jazz-era musicians (with a very much older 16th century meaning of "light, frivolous woman" which I suspect is off at a tangent somewhere).
I guess both terms arose from the general area of music but I've never thought of either as derived from the other, and until today it wouldn't have occurred to me to link them up.
Thanks for that, Richard. I, too, have never thought of the words as confusable. Now I’m realizing that “the jig is up,” which I’ve never thought about in a literal way, seems similar in meaning to, say, “stop playing games” or “cut the act.”
The OED has “origin unknown” for gig as a musical engagment. My wild guess would have to do with the carriage and the need to travel to an engagement.
On an unrelated note, I’m pleased to see that Thomas Nashe — a favorite writer of mine in grad school days — is first in the OED for jig as a con or trick. (Cited in the Grammarphobia post).
I have played jigs and gigues at gigs.
Nice!
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