My Name is a Joke

“Remember, remember, the Fifth of November, gunpowder, treason, and plot.”  And then remember, on the next day – the second Tuesday in this November – if you’re in Usamerica, to vote.

And perhaps help to get out the vote for the good guys.  I’ve already absentee-voted; when I lived in South Carolina and had a car, I found I could volunteer at the local party headquarters to give lifts to people who requested help to get to the polling stations.

I was never as politically active as the Guy who tried to blow up Parliament in 1606.

Our name is a joke in at least five countries.  Its origin is Norman-French, and Frenchmen have taken me to task for pronouncing it gai instead of gi.

It was given to me because my parents thought it was too short to be distorted by other kids – some hope!   Also because they were friends with the daughter of Sir Guy Dain, who was president of the medical association when Britain’s wonderful national health service was founded.  Also because  I was born in Warwickshire.

Guy of Warwick was the somewhat sad hero of a medieval romance, and there is a Guy’s Tower in Warwick Castle.  (There was also Guy of Gisborne, a darker figure, hired by the Sheriff of Nottingham to try to kill Robin Hood.)

These legends were popular for several centuries, but the Guy now remembered is Fawkes, whose ghastly execution became a public holiday.  His effigy will burn on bonfires all over England – we’ve learned that the most famous of these is at Lewes in Sussex.  The kids who came around for “Trick or treats” on Halloween night will come around with Guys on wheelbarrows, calling “Penny for the Guy!” and perhaps suggesting that I be thrown on the pyre.

The bonfire built on our beach in a previous year.

This year it’s been built but strong winds may not allow it to be lit.

Americans, when told that I’m just a guy and July the Fourth is my birthday, assume that I’m kidding.

In Israel, when I went to live and work for a while in a kibbutz, a child on being introduced to me looked up and said: “Shmo gai, aval hu har! – His name is ‘valley’ but he’s a mountain” because of my height.

And now, because of our visit last month to Dubrovnik, Mostar, and Split, I’ve learned that the alphabet in which Croatian and some other south Slavonic languages and dialects are written is called Gaj’s Alphabet, which sounds as if it’s mine.  Serbian and Croatian are essentially the same language distinguished by using respectively the Cyrillic alphabet and Gaj’s.  It was invented in 1835 by a Croatian linguist named Ljudevit Gaj, and is our ordinary Latin alphabet with a few modifications, such as three kinds of c distinguished by accents.

Like most other writing systems, it has a closer relation to its phonemes than does English spelling, in which guy and buy don’t look like what they sound like.  Someone once showed me this piece of doggerel, I don’t know who wrote it:

They brought their infant to the font,
His eyes were fair and dewy,
But when I murmured “Name this child”
The parents answered “Gooey.”

I started in astonishment
(They must have thought me screwy);
“In all my life I never heard
An infant christened ‘Gooey’.

“A sticky fate attends the child
Who bears a name so gluey:
And so I fear I must decline
To stigmatize it ‘Gooey’.”

“But, sir, we saw it in a book,
Sent us by Aunty Looie,
About a bold courageous knight
Whose Christian name was ‘Gooey’.”

If I had been American
I should have answered “Phooey,
No hero ever bore a name
So glutinous as Gooey.”

I asked them how to write it down,
To which they made reply:
“It’s really very simple, sir:
We spells it G-U-Y.”

Envoi:
Prince, if you had the weary task
Of naming babies “Gooey,”
You would not know if you should laugh
Or run away and crooey.