What is the origin of ‘Good God, Gertie! What a gash!’?
I don’t know but I doubt it will be PG rated…
I don’t know the origin, but I heard it in the Navy wayyyyyy long ago. And no, it’s not PG.
Dad was Navy, and I heard it from him. ISTR something about the Grand Canyon.
Never heard it in my life.
I worked with an ex sailor in the 1960s and he said it frequently.
Dennis
I know this is a guess, but it really sounds like lyric to a jazz age song. Like Flatfoot Floozie was a good boy (or something like that.)
A wee bit of googling suggests, not authoritatively, that “gash” was short for “gash hand” - a person with no particular job given only menial and/or meaningless tasks to do. Good God Gertie just a good alliteration to the insult.
My first thought was that this was some sort of indication of something being messed up or done incompetently: on this side of the Atlantic a “gash job” can be a somewhat clumsy lash-up. So this might be a comic-Victorian expression of that idea (maybe even a long forgotten comic’s catchphrase). But over here “gash” is also alternative slang for a vagina, so maybe there’s a deliberate comic confusion between the two - Google turns up this reference in an American novel, which implies exactly that:
(It’s from page 45 of The Minotaur Takes His Own Sweet Time, by Steven Sherrill.)
I don’t have any light to shed on the origin of the phrase, but in my head I hear the voice of Leslie Nielson saying it. It just sounds like something he would have said.
The way I heard it was in the early 1900’s Gertrude Stein was posing for Pablo Picasso, and as she walked out from behind the changing curtain, Picasso was heard uttering the phrase.
While that Minotaur book is a modern reference it does seem that both meanings of “gash” go back a ways, with the vulgar slang was first.
I can find this 1952 usage that seems to be using the phrase as the useless person meaning, or maybe double meaning with wound, but not with the vulgar slang.
But I’d guess the usage predates that.
To the guy I used to hear say it, it was most definitely a vaginal reference. He was in the Coast Guard actually but they seem as bawdy as the Navy. He would always mention that the Coast Guard had the highest dental requirements of any service branch and it was hard to get accepted.
Another of his references was to women who had a vagina “like the end of a pea-coat sleeve”.
Dennis
The first time I heard the phrase was in the factory. We got a new boss named Gertie, a big-hearted woman and a very good boss. Some of the guys would say the phrase, but never in her presence. After she left, I never heard it again, until now.
Never heard the whole phrase until now. Nor of “gash” in the sense of “gash hand” or “gash job” as cited by others above.
But I can confirm “gash” was used in the 1980s USAF a lot as slang for vagina in specific or women in general. It was mostly, but not always, pejorative. And always a low-class thing to say.
I can’t recall ever hearing it used in civilian practice then or now. I didn’t / don’t hang out with the loudly misogynist crowd though.
The saying “Good God Gertie!” came from a true story that occurred during the Revolutionary War. An English officer was captured by Indians & was about to be burned alive. A Private named Gertie was watching & the the officer screamed “Good God Gertie, just shoot me!” I’m sure I missed the particulars of the event but that is how the saying originated.
What is your source for this story?