the jig is up

[Neal Whitman]

My dad once told me about an ethnic joke that went around during his
high-school days in south Georgia in the 1950s. I won't repeat it here; the
relevant part is that it was about the first black astronaut, and the
punchline was "the jig is up."

Neal Whitman
Email: nwhitman at ameritech.net
Blog: http://literalminded.wordpress.com

----- Original Message -----
From: "Charles C Doyle" <cdoyle at UGA.EDU>
To: <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
Sent: Sunday, April 10, 2011 8:29 PM
Subject: Re: the jig is up


> ---------------------- Information from the mail
> header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Charles C Doyle <cdoyle at UGA.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: the jig is up
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> 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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