Lobby card for the 1926 film The Ramblin’ Galoot
6 September 2023
A galoot is an awkward and not-too-intelligent person. It’s often used in affectionate deprecation; you might call a large friend a big galoot. But most people would be surprised to find that the word has an origin in Royal Navy slang and that it is associated with a man who is perhaps the most colorful lexicographer in history.
Galoot is a mildly offensive term that originally referred to an inept sailor or to a marine on board ship, much like a modern sailor might use jarhead. Etymologist Anatoly Liberman points to the thirteenth century Italian galeot(t)o, “sailor, steersman,” as a possible source for galoot. The Italian word spread to other languages as well as continuing into Modern Italian, acquiring some additional senses like “galley slave,” “convict,” and “pimp” along the way. Liberman suggests the proximate origin is the Middle Dutch galioot. But he also notes that the problem with his proposed etymology is a gap of several centuries between the Middle Dutch and the word’s 1808 appearance in English. That gap is not necessarily disqualifying, as slang terms often have a long sub rosa existence before appearing in print, but it does work against the hypothesis to some degree.
Wiktionary goes another direction and traces galoot to the Arabic جالوت (jālūt, pronounced galūt in Egyptian Arabic), the proper name Goliath. This etymology, however, is unconvincing, not only because no route for transmission from Arabic to early nineteenth-century English slang is proffered, but also because the name Goliath is so well known in English that the adoption by English sailors of the Arabic name in preference to the English one seems highly doubtful. Just because a word in one language resembles one in another does not mean they are etymologically related.
Another proposed etymology, but one that is almost certainly wrong, is that it comes from the Krio adjective galut, which is applied to people and means “large.” Krio is an English-based creole spoken in Sierra Leone. Fyle and Jones’s A Krio-English Dictionary gives the etymology of the Krio word as a borrowing from English into Krio, not from one of the African languages that also constitute the creole.
The word’s first English-language appearance is in an anonymous 1808 poem, The Cruise: A Poetical Sketch, where it seems to refer to a new recruit who is inexperienced in sailing the high seas, and therefore can pose a danger to the ship if not properly supervised:
A Pupil of this school then, we can trace,
Our gallant, hardy Seaman, active BRACE;—
Yet strange however, as it may appear,
Ne’er had he been to us, so justly dear,
Had he continu’d longer, that pursuit;—
For Men-of-war, an absolute Galoot
Raw from the country, had been full as good
At first, at least;—but to be understood—
Such Collier Seamen, as have never been
Engag’d at sea, in any other sense
Than merely coasting,—ne’er had been to roam,
At any distance from their native home;
Returning, soon as the short run was made,
Are ever of a Man-of-war afraid,
So much so even as in bloom to fade,
When first they’re made to serve on-board of these,
And forc’d to quit a time, their well-known seas,
Nor quite allow’d to do just as they please.
Following this, galoot appears throughout the first half of the nineteenth century in various books and papers concerning the Royal Navy in the sense of a sailor or especially a marine. It had the connotation of a lumbering or clumsy person. Here is a passage from Frederick Marryat’s 1834 novel Jacob Faithful, that tells of the rescue of four sailors from a boat that had been capsized by the ineptitude of one of them:
“Have you got them all, waterman?” said he.
“Yes, sir, I believe so; I have four.”
“The tally is right,” replied he, “and four greater galloots were never picked up; but never mind that. It was my nonsense that nearly drowned them.”
In the 1860s, galoot gained a foothold in America, where it became a popular epithet among soldiers fighting the Civil War. It is in America that galoot loses its association with the navy and marines and acquired the current, general sense that we know today. Mark Twain, for example, uses it in his 1872 Roughing It:
He could lam any galoot of his inches in America. It was him that put down the riot last election before it got a start; and everybody said he was the only man that could have done it. He waltzed in with a spanner in one hand and a trumpet in the other, and sent fourteen men home on a shutter in less than three minutes.
The colorful lexicographer who is associated with the word is James Hardy Vaux (1782–1841?), who in 1812 compiled the Vocabulary of the Flash Language, a glossary of London slang in which he glosses galloot as “a soldier.” For years, his dictionary was the earliest known use of the word. That glossary is also notable because it is one of the first dictionaries compiled in Australia and because of Vaux’s somewhat notorious biography.
Vaux, a former sailor and legal clerk, was convicted of stealing a handkerchief and sentenced to seven years in the penal colony of Australia, arriving down under in 1801. He returned to England in 1807, returning to a life of crime and marrying a prostitute. Two years later was convicted of stealing from a jeweler’s shop and sent to Australia for life. During this second stint in Australia he wrote and had published his memoirs and the slang dictionary. He married again in 1818; the fate of his first wife is unknown. Vaux was pardoned in 1820, remaining in Australia for several years. He remarried again in 1827; committing bigamy as his second wife was still alive. He eventually found his way to Ireland, where in 1830 he was convicted of passing forged bank notes and sent to Australia yet again—making him the only person known to have been transported to Australia three times. In 1837 he was released from the penal colony and settled in Sydney. But two years later he was convicted of assaulting an eight-year-old girl. Vaux was released from prison in 1841 and subsequently disappeared. Unmentioned here are his numerous escape attempts and desertions from Royal Navy ships. Vaux undoubtedly picked up the term galoot during one of his stints as a sailor.
Sources:
Fink, Averil V. “Vaux, James Hardy (1782–1841).” Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 2, 1967.
Fyle, Clifford N. and Eldred D. Jones. A Krio-English Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1980, s.v. galut. Archive.org.
Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2023, s.v. galoot, n.
Historical Dictionary of American Slang, vol. 1 of 2. J. E. Lighter, ed. New York: Random House, 1994, s.v., galoot, n.
Liberman, Anatoly. ”Advice to the Etymologist: Never Lose Heart, or, The Origin of the Word Galoot,” OUPblog, 23 July 2008.
Marryat, Frederick. Jacob Faithful, vol. 3 of 3. London: Saunders and Otley, 1834, 82. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Naval Officer, A. The Cruise: A Poetical Sketch. London: J. Hatchard, 1808, 286–87. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v., galoot, n.
Twain, Mark (pseud. Samuel Clemens). Roughing it. Hartford, Connecticut: American Publishing, 1872, 336. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Vaux, James Hardy. A New and Comprehensive Vocabulary of the Flash Language (1812). Unknown publisher, 1819, 176, s.v. galloot. Archive.org.
Wiktionary, 29 August 2023, s.v. galoot, n.
Image credit: Action Pictures/Associated Exhibitors, 1926. Wikimedia. Public domain image.