Tuesday 27 December 2011

Lurgy, Lurgi or Lurden


Apologies for lack of posts. I have been struck down with a loathsome and lingering lurgy. Lurgy is a purely British term for an unspecified but horrid disease that is doing the rounds, and it was invented by comedians. The first recorded case of lurgy appeared in a 1959 episode of The Goon Show Lurgi Strikes Britain*. That episode was written by Spike Milligan and Eric Sykes, so I blame them for my current condition.

However, the OED, in an uncharacteristic fit of theorising, suggests that those writers may just possibly have got it from fever-lurdan, or the disease of laziness. Fever-lurdan was a facetious term not recorded after 1806, but its last recorded spelling was fever-largie, so maybe there's something in the connection. I'm either too lazy or too ill to research further.

By the way, as a fun bit of trivia, Jimi Hendrix first started taking acid because it made listening to the Goons much funnier.

Merry Christmas one and all.





*The Goons spelled it Lurgi, the OED has it as Lurgy, presumably to differentiate it from lurgi the chemical process of gasification (which is horribly relevant to me).

6 comments:

  1. I am also currently afflicted by a 'Lurgy' – or, rather, a cold. If 'Lurgy' involves an element of contagion, that I mustn't call it that, since my ailment is entirely bespoke, individual and copyrighted. I work on the assumption there ailments as people believe, we would be removing corpses of doctors and other medical professionals by the shovel.

    Get well soon.

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  2. That sentence should have read "if ailments were as contagious as people believe" - Sorry!

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  3. Doubtless it is just a fever-induced typo, but your Goon-Show dating is off by half a decade: Lurgi Strikes Britain was first transmitted on 9 November 1954. See, for example, the Goonography at the back of Wilmut and Grafton's Goon Show Companion.

    I'm too tired (on account of my own lurgi, and perhaps fever-lardan as well) to dig further, but I vaguely recall `lurgi' somewhere in Milligan's war-memoir books. It is probably not possible to say whether that was an accurate report of early-1940s usage or just a latter-day interpretation.

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  4. Isn't this just a facetious rendering of the word Allergy? Take the A as an indefinite article and harden the g? Seems to be in tune with the verbal larks of this team.

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  5. And of course the term has degenerated to some extent at the hands of schoolchildren, who 'give' one another the 'lurgy', which is transmitted by any physical contact whatsoever, in a game akin to tag but much more malicious. At least, they did in my primary school.
    I am led to believe that 'cooties' is an equivalent term (aren't children predictable) in the US, apparently originating from a word for headlice.

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