This has bugged me off and on since the late 60’s. A buddy of my brother’s who went through a couple years service in California in the Marines back in the 60’s was prone to abuse the English language by way of a combination of dyslexia and perhaps a bad ear for sounds.
My guess was that when he spoke of an officer as “The Big Gahundahide” that he was merely mishearing “The Big Kahuna” and was just unaware of the surfing term and the Hawaiian connection. That made perfect sense to me and I just wrote it off as ignorance and never questioned him about the term.
Have you ever heard of a word closer to this than Kahuna? If so, where and when, and what does it mean? My spelling is phonetic, more or less, and may be way off, so try the sound for homonyms.
In Rwanda, there’s Silverback Gorilla named Gohunda who is supposed to be the biggest gorilla in the world. That would be kind of an obscure reference, but who knows?
There’s a city in Tanzania called Kahunda, but that seems unlikely to have a connection.
One possibility is that it was a play on the officer’s actual name.
I would still hazard a guess that a mangling of “kahuna” is most likely, though.
Cool stuff there, Diogenes the Cynic, and it’s not totally out of the range of possibility that the term had some basis beyond this guy’s ability to mangle words. There have been other cases where his expressions came to make sense after I heard others use them, often with a slightly different pronunciation.
Military slang is a rich field for etymology! I suspect at least half of the “good words” have come from that source.
This is old stuff and I wouldn’t have thought of this thread on a bet until I got a PM asking about it.
Anybody have something to add?
I could see somebody mangling Naugahyde but can’t imagine it being anybody I knew or know. Maybe it’s the pelt of that Gahunda upthread being used as a seat cushion?
It has a bit of a Gothic ring to it, hasn’t it? Actually, I could imagine a Gothic word gahundahaitans (or something like that) meaning approximately “called by a hundred names”.
Gesundheit is what you say in German when someone sneezes (it means something like be healthy). Always a chance someone picked it up after spending time in the services in Germany, but not sure how this would morph into The Big Gesundeit.
It would be a morphing of hard-to-figure proportions.
Maybe somebody thought it might work well for “Your Healthiness”? In that respect it could parallel how one of my kids referred to one of his buddies as “Your Bigness.”
And maybe Lord Trump thought it was okay to say something is “bigly.”
In the Kinyarwanda language spoken in parts of Rwanda and Uganda, “gahunda” means appointment, agenda, plan, program [sub]damn, Google is smart[/sub]. “Hide” is an animal skin or pelt. Obviously, the term “Big Gahundahide” means “The Empty Bag of Skin in Charge of Setting the Plan”. Sounds like something they would say in the Army about an officer…