A plains pocket gopher (Geomys bursarius). A brown rodent with long claws.
14 October 2021
A gopher is a burrowing rodent of the family Geomyidae. Some thirty-five species of gopher are found throughout North and Central America. The word is almost certainly a clipping of megopher, a name for the gopher tortoise (Gopherus polyphemus) in several Muskogean languages. In Choctaw, a Muskogean language, kofussa means hollow or excavation, and the gopher tortoise is a burrowing creature. (Both /g/ and /k/ are velar plosives and it’s easy to exchange one for another, so the initial /k/ is understood as and becomes /g/ to those unfamiliar with the language.) But there are two other commonly seen uses of gopher, one is biblical and etymologically unrelated, the type of wood that Noah used to build his ark, and the second is a play on words used to refer to a menial assistant, one who runs errands.
Megopher appears in English in an 8 July 1789 letter published in the Augusta Chronicle and Gazette of the State to days later:
The father of Snarler, old Manger, ran himself to death that he might keep the allegators in the neighbouring pond from eating light-wood-knots; and Zoila, his mother, was found the ninth day driving the buzzards from the bones of a polecat, and at last expired by the mouth of a megopher’s hole, where she had lain twenty days keeping the owner from enjoying his habitation.
Megopher, in the form magopher, continued in southern, especially Georgia, dialect into the twentieth century.
The clipping gopher, used as the name of the tortoise, is recorded before that of the rodent. William Bartram did so in his 1791 account of his travels through the southern United States. The word appears twice in his account:
The dense, or caverns, dug in the sand-hills, by the great land-tortoise, called here Gopher*, present a very singular appearance: these vast caves are their castles and diurnal retreats, from whence they issue forth in the night, in search of prey.
The note to this passage reads:
* Testudo Polyphemus.
The second instance in Bartram’s account reads:
Observed as we passed over the sand hills, the dens of the great land tortoise, called gopher: this strange creature remains yet undescribed by historians and travellers. The first signs of this animal’s existence, as we travel Southerly, are immediately after we cross the Savanna River.
The use of gopher as a synonym for tortoise or turtle continues in southern US dialect to this day.
Gopher as the name of the rodent is first recorded several decades after its use to mean a tortoise, in an installment of an 1811 series of newspaper articles by H.M. Brackenridge, Sketches of the Territory of Louisiana:
The gopher is another non descript, which lives under ground, in the prairies; but is also found east of the Mississippi.
Non-descript is being used here in its technical sense of a previously undescribed species. an editor’s note to this passage reads:
If the gopher is not the animal described, in the systima natura, as mus bursorius, by Linnӕus, it is, as yet, undescribed. A careful examination, into the construction of its mouth, and the number of the teeth, will convince us, that it ought not to belong to the genus mus, but ought to form a new genus, between that family, Arctomys.
The series of articles was re-edited and published in 1814 under the title Views of Louisiana.
That accounts for the animals, but what about the use of gopher to mean a menial assistant? That sense is a play on words. It is usually spelled gofer, but is occasionally spelled gopher, as well. A gofer or gopher is someone who runs errands for someone else, who “goes for” things. The term is recorded in a 1930 list of gangster slang terms that appeared in the journal American Mercury. In the glossary it is defined as “a dupe,” but the example sentence that is given uses it in the sense of a menial person:
Gofor, n.: a dupe.
“Listen monkey, don’t be a gofer all your life.”
The biblical gopher wood, on the other hand, is a bit of a mystery. Gopher here is a translation of the Hebrew גֹפֶר. But no one knows exactly what the Hebrew word refers to. It is what is known as a hapax legomenon, a term that appears in only one place. That place is Genesis 6:14. Its first English appearance is in a 1568 translation of the Bible:
Make thee an Arke of Pine trees
To which the translator has added the marginal note:
Gophere a very lyght kinde of wood
The 1611 Authorized (King James) Version translates Genesis 6:14 as:
Make thee an Arke of Gopher-wood
Some present day translations, like the New Revised Standard Version translate it as cypress wood. To which the New Oxford Annotated Bible adds the note: “Meaning of Heb uncertain.”
So, we have three different origins here. A Hebrew word of mysterious meaning, a Native American name for a burrowing creature, and a pun on gopher and go for.
Sources:
American Heritage Dictionary, fifth edition, 2020, s.v. gopher, n.
Bartram, William. Travels Through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida, the Cherokee Country, the Extensive Territories of the Muscogulges or Creek Confederacy, and the Country of the Chactaws. Philadelphia: James and Johnson, 1791. Reprinted London: J. Johnson, 1792, 180. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).
Brackenridge, H.M. “Sketches of the Territory of Louisiana.” Louisiana Gazette (Saint Louis), 28 February 1811, 2. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.
———. Views of Louisiana. Pittsburgh: Cramer, Spear, and Eichbaum, 1814, 58–59. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Burke, James P. “The Argot of the Racketeers.” The American Mercury, December 1930, 456. The Unz Review.
Dictionary of American Regional English, 2013, s.v. magopher, n., gopher, n.
Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2021, s.v. gofer, n.
The Holie Bible. London: Richard Jugge, 1568. Early English Books Online (EEBO).
The Holy Bible (Authorized Version). London: Robert Barker, 1611. Early English Books Online (EEBO).
Letter, 8 July 1789. The Augusta Chronicle and Gazette of the State (Georgia), 11 July 1789, 4. Digital Library of Georgia: Georgia Historic Newspapers.
Merriam-Webster, s.v. gopher, noun.
New Oxford Annotated Bible (New Revised Standard Version). Michael D. Coogan, ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007.
Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. gopher, n.1, gopher, n.2, gofer, n.3.
Photo credit: U.S. National Park Service, no date. Public domain image.