George
\ˈjȯrj\
\ˈjȯrj\
This week on the Bluefish Editorial desk I have been working with a biography that tells the life story of an immigrant who came to the US from Poland in the 1920s. To mark the start of his new life, this young man decided to shed his birth name in favor of something new and cleanly American: he named himself George. But this choice of name was not made in honor of any of the usual suspects (George Washington or George McClellan or even George Washington Carver). Instead it was an homage to an idiomatic phrase I had never heard: “Let George do it!”
Of course I looked it up. (That is, after all, my job!) “Let George do it” is a bit of early 20th century North American slang, used when a person means to let someone else do the work or take responsibility for something: “We have to make a schedule for cleaning out the office refrigerator; otherwise everyone will just let George do it.”
Okay, I thought, that’s clear enough—but why George? Was a historical George left holding the bag at some crucial juncture? No less an authority than H.L. Mencken suggested that the phrase “Let George do it” comes from the 16th century King Louis XII, who liked to hand off boring tasks to his prime minister Cardinal Georges d'Amboise with a breezy “Laissez faire à Georges.” Alas, much as I want this to be true, the phrase doesn’t seem to have ever been widely used in French and it didn’t appear in English until 300 years later.
There is of course St. George, patron saint of England and a whole bunch of other countries. (Also, for what it’s worth, the patron saint of skin disease sufferers and syphilitics.) He is often invoked when there’s serious business to be accomplished, like defeating the French (viz: “Cry ‘God for Harry! England and St. George!’”)
Of course I looked it up. (That is, after all, my job!) “Let George do it” is a bit of early 20th century North American slang, used when a person means to let someone else do the work or take responsibility for something: “We have to make a schedule for cleaning out the office refrigerator; otherwise everyone will just let George do it.”
Okay, I thought, that’s clear enough—but why George? Was a historical George left holding the bag at some crucial juncture? No less an authority than H.L. Mencken suggested that the phrase “Let George do it” comes from the 16th century King Louis XII, who liked to hand off boring tasks to his prime minister Cardinal Georges d'Amboise with a breezy “Laissez faire à Georges.” Alas, much as I want this to be true, the phrase doesn’t seem to have ever been widely used in French and it didn’t appear in English until 300 years later.
There is of course St. George, patron saint of England and a whole bunch of other countries. (Also, for what it’s worth, the patron saint of skin disease sufferers and syphilitics.) He is often invoked when there’s serious business to be accomplished, like defeating the French (viz: “Cry ‘God for Harry! England and St. George!’”)
| The historical St. George was a 3rd century Roman soldier from Palestine, the child of aristocratic Greek Christian parents, who became an officer in the army of emperor Diocletian. He did well, rose in the ranks, and became a tribune and a member of the Imperial Guard. |  Fresco depicting St. George, from the St. George Church Museum: Kyustendil, Bulgaria © Plamen Agov • studiolemontree.com, via Wikimedia Commons |
Around the year 300 AD, though, Diocletian was being prodded by one of his subordinates to crack down on the Christian element. And when Diocletian caved to this pressure and asked his soldiers to make sacrifices to the Roman gods, George refused loudly and publicly. Diocletian seems to have been rather distressed by this. He liked George, and at bottom he really seemed more interested in tax reform and overhauling the imperial bureaucracy than engaging in pogroms. He tried to hush the whole thing up, offering George a promotion, and money, and land, if he could just pipe down and not make such a big fuss over the whole monotheism thing.
But George was ready to step up and do the job no one else wanted to do. So he gave away all his goods to the poor and told the embarrassed Diocletian that, no, he couldn’t recant and Diocletian would just have to execute him. Which he reluctantly did. (This whole persecution endeavor seems to have taken some of the heart out of Diocletian, who stepped down when his term as Emperor ended two years later and retired to the Dalmatian coast to grow vegetables.)
That was the story for about 800 years, until the Crusaders—who revered St. George as a fellow soldier and who were trying to encourage people to step up and take on the hard work of conquering the Holy Land—decided that it might hurt recruitment if “let George do it” meant giving away one’s treasure and agreeing to have one’s head cut off. Maybe George could be shown getting rich and winning glory? Add a dash of manly heroism, maybe a little love interest? And maybe someone else could be on the receiving end of the head-cutting-off part?
So they went Hollywood: Action-Hero George (strapping and handsome, and accompanied by a very fine horse) comes to a city troubled by a dragon, which they have been placating with a steady diet of sheep and maidens.
But George was ready to step up and do the job no one else wanted to do. So he gave away all his goods to the poor and told the embarrassed Diocletian that, no, he couldn’t recant and Diocletian would just have to execute him. Which he reluctantly did. (This whole persecution endeavor seems to have taken some of the heart out of Diocletian, who stepped down when his term as Emperor ended two years later and retired to the Dalmatian coast to grow vegetables.)
That was the story for about 800 years, until the Crusaders—who revered St. George as a fellow soldier and who were trying to encourage people to step up and take on the hard work of conquering the Holy Land—decided that it might hurt recruitment if “let George do it” meant giving away one’s treasure and agreeing to have one’s head cut off. Maybe George could be shown getting rich and winning glory? Add a dash of manly heroism, maybe a little love interest? And maybe someone else could be on the receiving end of the head-cutting-off part?
So they went Hollywood: Action-Hero George (strapping and handsome, and accompanied by a very fine horse) comes to a city troubled by a dragon, which they have been placating with a steady diet of sheep and maidens.
St. George and the Dragon by Paolo Uccello - The Yorck Project: 10.000 Meisterwerke der Malerei. DVD-ROM, 2002. ISBN 3936122202. Distributed by DIRECTMEDIA Publishing GmbH.. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.
When George appears the king’s daughter is about to be sacrificed, either because she’s been chosen by lot or because they’ve run through the local maiden supply and she is the only one left. George beheads the dragon, frees the princess, and rides back to the city in triumph where they shower him with gold and flowers and gratefully convert to Christianity on the spot.
| (In what one might call the Indie version of this story, George gets the princess to put her sash around the dragon’s neck, which tames it so that it follows her like a puppy, and all three of them (four, if you count the horse) return to the city together. The people are terrified, but George offers them a deal: if they convert to Christianity he guarantees the dragon won’t hurt them. Caught between baptism on the one hand, and the toothy monster that has eaten so many of their daughters on the other, the townspeople opt for baptism by the thousands—after which George kills the dragon and cuts it into pieces. |  "St. George and the Dragon." By Thomas Maybank [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons |
This strikes me as kind of a jerk move on a lot of levels. First off, intimidating people into mass conversion by threatening them with a dragon is a douchebag maneuver and theologically suspect to boot. Plus, it doesn’t seem very fair to the tame and trusting dragon, who is probably hoping for no more than a dry spot to sleep, meaningful employment, and maybe the occasional evening of sheep sloppy Joes and trash TV—and who then winds up getting cut into pieces to prove some kind of point about God’s inevitable triumph over lizards.
But I digress.)
But I digress.)
So what is there in George-ness that inspires noble exertion? What magic is in that name? It comes from the Latin Georgius, from the Greek name Γεωργιος (Georgios), which was derived from the Greek word γεωργος (georgos) meaning farmer or husbandman. Zeus himself was a George: the Athenians sometimes called him Zeus Geōrgos: the god of crops and harvest. The word can be broken down even further into the elements γη (ge) "earth" and εργον (ergon) "work" (ergon, of course, gives us both “ergonomics” and “organ”).
| So it turns out that the name George is, fundamentally, about work. Which kind of fits when you think about it. British aviators in the 1930s called the auto-pilot George. Curious George, in one of his greatest adventures, Takes a Job. |  A classic! Plus, he gets into the ether. |
What name could be more fitting for the George in my manuscript? He was the kind of person who would step up to take responsibility for tasks that other people would just as soon avoid. Even better, he spent his career as a labor organizer, working with shoe and boot workers in the Midwest. In fact, he spent his career slaying dragons, from foot-dragging factory owners to corrupt union emperors trying to purge the leftist elements from their ranks. In a world that often shrugs and says, "Let George do it," we could use more like him.
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