the jig is up

[Charles C Doyle]

Two points, possibly not altogether relevant:  [1] "gig" is an old spelling of "jig" (the dance), presumably pronounced the same.  [2] Could "the jig is up" possibly be deemed some sort of a racial slur (or something that might be so perceived, like "niggard," thence best avoided)?

--Charlie

________________________________________
From: American Dialect Society [ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] on behalf of victor steinbok [aardvark66 at GMAIL.COM]
Sent: Sunday, April 10, 2011 3:37 PM


Spotted from ABC news (quoting an anonymous aid):

> [Republicans] realized that kind of the gig was up.

205K raw for "the gig is up", 356K raw for "the jig is up"
Similarly, 56K raw for "the gig was up" and 135K for "the jig was up"

I thought, perhaps, that there might have been some legitimately
independent uses of "gig" associated with musical performances, but
that's not the evidence I am seeing in the search. It seems to be
almost entirely eggcornish. While in the above quote it still might
have been a transcriber-induced eggcorn, reporters seem to repeat this
a lot.

http://goo.gl/njHRD
> "He thought in the year 2000, 2001, to use the colloquial phrase, the gig was up," said Joseph Cotchett, who talked with Madoff for four hours Tuesday at the Butner Federal Correctional Institution near Research Triangle Park, North Carolina.

This issue has been noticed before (the top hit in Google) in the CBC
Words: Woe & Wonder column.

http://goo.gl/Mn0iA
GIGS, JIGS, AND JIBES. By Blair Shewchuk

I am not going to replicate the entire post, but the circumstances
that brought it about were very similar to the line that sparked my
interest.

VS-)

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