{"id":2465,"date":"2025-04-09T21:23:20","date_gmt":"2025-04-10T01:23:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/?p=2465"},"modified":"2025-04-12T20:56:19","modified_gmt":"2025-04-13T00:56:19","slug":"word-of-the-week-googly-eyed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/2025\/04\/09\/word-of-the-week-googly-eyed\/","title":{"rendered":"Word of the Week! Googly-Eyed"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Book<\/a>Once you start looking for them, you cannot unsee them. It began on the Amtrak on my way to Baltimore to attend the CCCC 2025 convention. In the Quiet Car there appeared a poster with a young woman looking at the Amtrak schedule on her smart phone.<\/p>\n

Some wag had stuck little plastic googly-eyes on the poster. I laughed out loud. Nothing academic here, but the term began to interest me. Where did it come from?<\/p>\n

In Baltimore, on a stroll toward Fell’s Point, I had two more googly-eye spottings. One appeared on the cover of a book; the other on a harbor trash-collector boat. The signboard identifying parts of the boat noted that the goggly-eyes make the boat look friendly.<\/p>\n

\"Boat<\/a>I’d assumed, wrongly as usual, that our term was a corruption (or improvement, your choice) of the phrase goggle-eyed. In my cruel high school, I learned how that meant anyone with thick glasses or bulging eyes.<\/p>\n

The OED<\/a> set me to rights on this matter, noting that we have “Perhaps a variant or alteration of another lexical item.” That “perhaps” provides a coy way of saying “we really do not know.”<\/p>\n

My money, as well as Wikipedia’s<\/a>, is on Barney Google, a nearly forgotten cartoon character. He is no relation that I know of to the software giant and dates from the early 20th Century.<\/p>\n

Barney did indeed have bulging eyes. Now I need to go to a craft store and find some stick-on googly eyes for…never you mind. I’m not the only one<\/a> thinking of this idea.<\/p>\n

\"Barney<\/a><\/p>\n

On a different train coming back from Baltimore, there they were again. Someone is up to something.<\/p>\n

\"Googly<\/a><\/p>\n

Thank goodness.<\/p>\n

If you have any clever ideas about our term’s origin, or, better still, a term or metaphor of some consequence that you’d like covered here, send them to jessid-at-richmond-edu or leave a comment below.<\/p>\n

See all of our Metaphors of the Month\u00a0here<\/a>\u00a0and Words of the Week\u00a0here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Images: Barney from Wikipedia; other googly eyes by me.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Once you start looking for them, you cannot unsee them. It began on the Amtrak on my way to Baltimore to attend the CCCC 2025 convention. In the Quiet Car there appeared a poster with a young woman looking at the Amtrak schedule on her smart phone. Some wag had stuck little plastic googly-eyes on … Continue reading Word of the Week! Googly-Eyed<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":589,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[87405,40197],"tags":[2522],"class_list":["post-2465","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-etymology","category-vocabulary","tag-word-of-the-week"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pcsCNV-DL","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2465","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/589"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2465"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2465\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2478,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2465\/revisions\/2478"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2465"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2465"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2465"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}