I am seeking an objective answer to my question, but I realize that this may drift into IMHO territory. It also has elements of CS. So mods, feel free to move as you see fit.
I heard this word used in two different episodes of The Twilight Zone (specifically, Nervous Man in a Four-Dollar Room, and A Kind of Stopwatch)
In the first instance, it’s used to refer to the old man who gives the protagonist the magical stopwatch. The old man is slightly comically drunk, and has what sounds to me like a Yiddish accent.
In the second instance, it’s used to refer to the owner of a bar whom the protagonist is supposed to bump off. We never see the owner, but merely hear him described as an old man who’s resisting the local mob’s protection racket. The mob boss (and later, the protagonist) refer to him disparingly as “some old gleep”.
I had previously thought the pronunciation was ‘gleeb’, but after listening again more carefully, I am pretty sure it’s ‘gleep’.
Both episodes were written by Rod Serling (he wrote Nervous Man in a Four-Dollar Room, and the teleplay for A Kind of Stopwatch, which was based on a short story by Michael D. Rosenthal).
After googling and “dictionary.com’ing” all the different spellings I can think of, I was able to find some uses of ‘gleep’, which appear to be related to Yiddish conversations, but nothing definitive. (Also, that GLEEP is an acronym for Graphite Low-Energy Experimental Pile).
Slim picking’s here, but I remember my Dad using it to refer to someone with crossed or wandering eyes, as in, “you know, that guy with the gleepy eye.” He might have also used it to refer to any sort of physical anomaly, but my memories a bit fuzzy.
I think the line is “If the enemy hasn’t studied his agrippa”, meaning the agrippa defense (I don’t know whether or not this is a real fencing thing, but it’s real in the book).
The word gleep shows up in print in 1947. IT wasn’t Yiddish. Just a young person/student’s version of an “odd, obnoxious, or worthless person.” Much like the word “drip” used to describe someone. Youth slang. Never really caught on big.
This from the Random House Historical Dic. of of American Slang, by Jon Lighter.
Not that I’m aware of, although my grandparents (his parents) did. He knew all the nasty phrases though, so in a sense, you could say that he spoke it fluently.
There’s also “gleeb”, which must be another rare word that never caught on. Early in The Wild One one of Johnny’s (Marlon Brando’s) gang steals a racing trophy and hands it to him; later on, Chino (Lee Marvin) alludes to the fact that Johnny really didn’t win that trophy, but only “gleebed” it.
A previous thread on this topic has some ideas. samclem states (without providing a reference) that it means an “odd, obnoxious, or worthless person”, and dates from 1947. Lure says that he used it in the 1950s to mean a square or a nerd.
There’s also this exchange from Miriam Young’s The Secret of Stone House Farm, from 1963, which fits in with the “odd person” or “nerd” definitions from that thread:
The words “drip” and “gleep”…because of the former, the latter rings a bell that it is also a synonym for slang like “clap” for gonorrhea. Wrong chain of associations?
ETA: American speaker (not in group), of Yiddish here, and by far the most common pejorative word for old man (old fart) is alte kacker, “old shitter.”
Yup, Camillo, supposedly a buddy of Michelangelo.
Westley, a Thibault-school fencer, was smartly handling Inigo’s sallies, which he recognized as based on Great Representation of the Art and Use of Fencing by Capo Ferro. (Does he actually say this outloud in the move?)
Take a look at the Thibault page and its mandalas to get a sense of the “philosophy”–>“geometric science” claims the fencing schools felt it necessary to establish.
