exactamundo was Re: gigung(o)us, gigund(o)us, gigunda, gigundo

[Benjamin Zimmer]

On Thu, 28 Apr 2005 09:33:52 -0700, Towse <my.cache at GMAIL.COM> wrote:

>On 4/28/05, Dave Robertson <ddr11 at uvic.ca> wrote:
>> Didn't the character Fonzie on "Happy Days" in the 1970s always say
>> "exactamundo"?
>
>Fonz said, "Correctamundo."
><http://www.tvland.com/shows/happydays/downloads/sounds/fonzamundo.wav>
>
>Perhaps the Ninja Turtles took off on that.

Fonzie also said "coolamundo":

http://www.sitcomsonline.com/sounds/coolamundo.wav

He might have said other "X-amundo" forms, but "correctamundo" was surely
the most famous of them and the inspiration for the Ninja Turtles. It was
also revived in the screenplay for _Pulp Fiction_ (1994):

      Jules:    Nobody's gonna hurt anybody. We're gonna be like
                three little Fonzies here. And what's Fonzie like?
                Come on Yolanda, what's Fonzie like?
      Yolanda:  Cool?
      Jules:    What?
      Yolanda:  He's cool.
      Jules:    Correctamundo. And that's what we're gonna be.
                We're gonna be cool.

I've also seen "wrongamundo", as in this example:

-----
http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0316174688/?v=search-inside&keywords=amundo
_Flight (Smallville Series for Young Adults, No. 3)_ by C. Bennett and J.
Gottesfeld (2002)
"You bought a parrot?" Clark guessed. "Wrong-amundo. Whitney gave it to me."
-----

And this example shows that "-amundo" can be used productively in the sort
of "mock Spanish" that Jane Hill has written about:

-----
http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/078790239X/?v=search-inside&keywords=amundo
_Restructuring in the Classroom: Teaching, Learning, and School
Organization_ by R. F. Elmore, et al. (1996)
She announced that because it was "el tough amundo" (very difficult), she
had made up a game for them to use today to figure out how "to reason out
numbers and to write them the right way."
-----


--Ben Zimmer