the jig is up

[victor steinbok]

Antedating "jig is over" to 1760?

On Sun, Apr 10, 2011 at 8:29 PM, Charles C Doyle <cdoyle at uga.edu> wrote:
>
> Two points, possibly not altogether relevant: Â [1] "gig" is an old spelling of "jig" (the dance), presumably pronounced the same. Â [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)?


This is interesting because what I thought I had discovered is that
"jig" is an old spelling of "gig". ;-) On the second point, I'll have
to defer to someone who actually knows something about it--this is not
an issue that's ever come up in /my/ limited experience.

OED has "jig is up" to 1800 and "jig is over" to 1777, with "jig"
proper going back another 200 years.

>  5. A piece of sport, a joke; a jesting matter, a trifle; a sportive trick or cheat. the jig is up (or the jig is over ) = ‘the game is up’, it is all over. Now dial. or slang.


For me, "the jig is up" will forever be connection to the History of
the World: Part I ("The jig is up!--and gone!)

But consider the following.

http://goo.gl/yZloy
The Critical Review: or, Annals of Literature. Volume 9. London: April 1760
Article VIII. [Review of] The Actor, a Poetical Epistle to Bonnell
Thornton. p. 305
> This is, indeed, a fault much more common abroad than in England; yet even here it is coming into fashion. This insipid method of cringing for praise, is every whit as paltry as that of the hornpipe dancers at Sadler's Wells, who, when their jig is over, scrape round to the company for halfpence.

This doesn't sound very "sporty" or "jesting". In fact, it sounds more
like "dancing" or "performance".

> 1. a. A lively, rapid, springy kind of dance. See also Irish jig n. at Irish adj. and n. Special uses 4.
>  2. The music for such a dance; a rapid lively dance-tune; spec. one in triple rhythm (usually 6–8 or 12–8) used as the last movement of a suite (oftener in the French form gigue n. or Italian giga n.).
> †4. A light performance or entertainment of a lively or comical character, given at the end, or in an interval, of a play. Obs.

This puts a whole different spin on "jig is over/up". Did it really
start out as "sporting" or "jesting"? Or is the 1760 case actually
more representative of the original.

BTW, all of these come spelled as "gigg", "iig", "iigg" and "jigg". So
the gig/jig thing goes back and forth over the centuries...

But that was well before spelling standardization--in contemporary
use, "jig" is jig and "gig" is gig. I've never heard the two
interchangeable, although I am not suggesting it's necessarily wrong.

One reason I posted on this initially is that I was not even sure how
the "gig was up" was meant to be pronounced. Are both "jig" and "gig"
pronounced the same in these instances or is "gig" really what is
intended?

VS-)

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