On the flight back from London last weekend, I watched the movie “First Man” with Ryan Gosling as Neil Armstrong. The movie was about the Gemini and Apollo missions up to and including the moon landing. One thing I couldn’t help but notice was that everyone in the movie pronounced Gemini “GEM-in-ee”. I don’t know anyone who pronounces it that way these days, it’s “GEM-in-eye”. Was Gem-in-ee the popular pronunciation back in the 50s and 60s? When did it change?
The NY Times wondered the same thing. GEM-in-knee is the NASA prescribed pronunciation of the project.
Why Does ‘First Man’ Say Gemini as ‘Geminee’? NASA Explains. Sorta. - The New York Times
How about a brief explanation for those who don’t have or want a NYTimes subscription?
Pretty sure the article isn’t behind a paywall, but it quoted the ‘authoritative’ 1965 newspaper article in which NASA stated that it is pronounced like Jiminy, as in Jiminy Cricket. It goes on to say that pronouncing it Jiminy is a sort of shibboleth in the space community indicating that you are ‘in the know.’
The long and short is that both pronunciations are correct and the filmmakers chose to stick with Jiminy.
It is.
Sorry about that. I neither have nor want a subscription and I got to it without being prompted, but I clicked on the citation in the Wikipeda article about Gemini (which has a section on pronunciation that directly mentions First Man).
Because that was NASA’s official pronunciation.
–Houston UPI, April 7, 1965
No reason was given.
OK, so it wasn’t ever the popular pronunciation, just the one NASA decided to go with. Interesting.
I don’t know what qualifies as popular pronunciation, but this news report from 1965 uses the NASA pronunciation.
Only way I’ve ever heard it pronounced is JEM-i-nye.
Maybe I’m weird, but I put the M in the second syllable.
In any movies, newsreels, or historical documentaries, the only way I’ve ever heard it pronounced is “Gem-in-eye”.
Anyone happen to know how it would be pronounced in the actual Greek? I wouldn’t be surprised if someone at NASA actually knew, and pronounced it that way.
Or it could be the usual American English mangling of foreign words. (how do you get “Man-shack” out of Manchaca Rd. in Austin anyway?)
Gemini is Latin. In Latin it is pronounced with a hard G and ee instead of eye at the end.
It’s Latin, /ˈɡɛ.mɪ.niː/. That’s a “hard g” like in get, with a “short e”, “short i”, and “long ee” at the end.
Edited to add:
These divine twins are originally Sumerian.
Ah… so the ‘ee’ is actually more accurate than the 'eye" pronunciation, even if the “Gem” part at the front is mispronounced?
Here’s a gift link for those who want to read the whole explanation.
Depends on what you mean by “authentic.” It’s how it would have originally been pronounced, but Latin pronunciation changed over time, and even diverged as new languages developed. The palatalization of the G happened in late Latin.
Latin continued being spoken as a scholarly language long after it had been dead, and that pronunciation diverged in various language. The English Great Vowel shift even affected scientific Latin and Greek.
The usual scientific pronunciation (in English) at the time would have used the “eye” vowel. NASA bucked the trend. Those who actually worked on it used the “Jiminy” pronunciation. And I note that it’s “Jiminy, not Jeminy” which aligns with one explanation I found: that most who actually worked on the project had Southern accents, hence the PIN-PEN merger (im and em pronounced the same). It would not be hard for the usual pronunciation to also lose the -I for efficiency.
Other ideas were an attempt to distance it from astrology, or having it sound similar to Mercury. But at the end of the day, it became more of a shibboleth. They could tell you actually were affiliated with the project if you used the “correct” Jiminy pronunciation.
The thought just occurred to me that I’ve said it both ways, depending on the circumstances. When associated with the space missions I’ll say it with the “ee” sound because that’s how I recall it being said on TV at the time. Yet if someone asks me about me and my wife’s birthdays (within 3 days of each other, in May) I would say that we’re both Gemineyes.
Interesting sidelight here:
Among the Romans there were “mild” oaths, judged suitable for children and for women, just as we have “gosh” and “golly” in place of “god”, or “Gee Whiz” and various others in place of “Jesus”. Two such “minced oaths” were “Edepol” and “Ecastor”, which were oaths to Pollux and Castor, respectively. Apparently it was OK to swear by the sons of a god, rather than saying “By Zeus!” and swearing by the god himself.
Fast forward several centuries. People still revere the Classics, and scholars still have knowledge of Greek and Latin and use them. Some of these wise guys evidently re-introduced swearing by Castor and Pollux, but using “Gemini” rather than the earlier forms. Linguists claim that this can be traced back to about 1800. “Gemini” got corrupted to “Jiminy”, which suggests that popular usage had the pronunciation of “Gemini” as “JIM -in-knee” rather than “JIm -in-EYE”. Somewhere along the line someone added, for emphasis, or maybe just because of the initials, an extra word, “Jiminy Christmas” or “JIminy Crickets” (“J.C.” = “Jesus Christ”, you see_So a minced oath based on Graeco-Roman mythology gets an upgrade to become a minced Christian oath.
It must’ve stayed in use, because you find it used up to the present. Google N-gram has “Jiminy Christmas” going back before 1880, while “Jiminy Crickets” starts up then. It’s used by Dorothy in the 1938 movie Wizard of Oz and by John Darling in the 1951 Disney Peter Pan.
But the biggest change came when Disney made a movie out of Carlo Collodi’s children’s book Pinocchio in 1940, and they decided to give the otherwise un-named “Cricket” the name “Jiminy Cricket” (The character had no forename before that, in any edition). After that point, “Jiminy Chricket” gets equal footing with the plural “Jiminy Crickets” on Google n-gram. It wasn’t until the Disney cartoon that the singular form got established.