Gouge
is one of the Naval Academy’s contributions to the slang lexicon of the larger U.S. Navy. The website of the Navy’s Chief Information Officer explains that gouge
means the heart of the matter; or outstanding test-preparation material,
and that it originated at the US Naval Academy and was introduced from there into the wider Navy.
It also offers an interesting etymological lesson as its original meaning was far less benign than the current one. A rise in academy slang dictionaries around the turn of the 19th century provides many useful resources for this lesson.
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| The "Naval Academy Alphabet" in 1878's collection of poems, songs, and humor, Fag-ends from the Naval Academy, may mark the public debut of gouge as a slang term. |
Many of these dictionaries found their way into The Lucky Bag, the academy’s yearbook, where family and friends of the midshipmen no doubt needed assistance translating the writing in the book. The premiere edition of The Lucky Bag in 1894 offers the surprise that gouge was originally used as both a noun and a verb. As a verb, at that time, it meant to obtain unauthorized assistance,
whereas the noun meant any little artifice whereby anyone receives unauthorized assistance in the recitation room.
A few years later, Park Benjamin, a member of the class of 1867, defined the term in his 1900 history of the academy: using unlawful or improper aids in the recitation-room, such, for example, as copying from leaves of text-books torn out and concealed about the person.
In other words, gouge initially meant cheating or a device used for cheating.
One difficulty in relying on The Lucky Bag dictionaries is that, as time went on, midshipmen started using them as a chance to display their wit, concocting playful, tongue-in-cheek definitions that often hid more than they revealed about the terms. For instance, the 1905 Lucky Bag defined gouge
as an obsolete term that was the sin of our forefathers that is not visited on the children.
By 1920, it was the one thing that enables a prof to put it all over a section on an Ordnance P[ractical]-Work,
and in 1925 it was a crossword puzzle with the solution present enabling the prof to buffalo his section.
Fortunately, the 1920s offered another, somewhat clearer source for the meaning of Naval Academy slang. A 1922 booklet on midshipman vocabulary, Seagoing Slang, showed both noun and verb forms were still used and the meaning of the verb hadn’t changed since 1894. However, the noun definition, while admittedly incorporating some Lucky Bag wit, displayed something less nefarious than previous meanings. Now, a gouge was how to do it. The thing that enables a prof. to fool us.
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| The name of the Naval Academy's textbook store - Good Gouge - would have been an oxymoron in the 19th century. |
The 1930s saw The Lucky Bag incorporating more photos that replaced the slang dictionaries but also saw the introduction of Reef Points, the pocket guide to the academy given to plebes when they first arrive, which often included slang dictionaries. In 1935, the verb form of gouge was still present and had probably the clearest definition: to cheat.
The noun form changed just a bit: solution to a prob[lem], as written up for profs.
The bluntness of the verb form got toned down by 1940 to the point of being meaningless: to gouge.
Ten years later, the verb form dropped off and the noun changed to a collection of answers that even the profs. understand.
An artificial influence upon the meaning of gouge
may have been the academy’s Honor Concept, adopted in the early 1950s. Good Gouge: An Investigation into the Origins of Naval Academy Slang, written in 1982 by the midshipmen in Professor Michael Parker’s Rhetoric and Introduction to Literature class noted the concept’s premise that a midshipman does not lie, cheat, or steal
was incompatible with the lighthearted classroom antics implied in gouging prior to that period. The authors argued that the elevation of cheating to a serious offense meant that gouge
came to mean something less than cheating and a legitimate aid to learning and study.
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| From the June Week, 1947, issue of Trident magazine comes another take on the origin of the term "gouge." |
Nevertheless, the definition of gouge
in Reef Points remained static for thirty years after 1950. When it did change for the 1980-81 academic year, one finally got a straightforward, innocuous meaning that had probably been around for a decade or more: the answers or method of accomplishment to a test or any such activity.
And that definition has remained constant ever since, with one of the older, funnier definitions sometimes accompanying the real one.
Thus gouge
made an about face from an illicit cheating aid to an accepted study aid over the course of a century, and during that time also worked its way from the Naval Academy into the Navy’s lexicon. But study aids don’t always mean true learning is taking place, so these days, the definition of “gouge” is accompanied by a warning: live by the gouge, die by the gouge.
Sources:
Benjamin, Park. The United States Naval Academy Being the Yarn of the American Midshipman (Naval Cadet). New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1900.
The Lucky Bag. Annapolis, Md: First Class, United States Naval Academy, 1894.
Parker, Michael, editor. Good Gouge: An Investigation into Naval Academy Slang. Annapolis, Md.: United States Naval Academy, 1982.
Reef Points. Annapolis, Md: United States Naval Academy. Print.
"Slang." Naval Academy Archives Reference Files, 1845-2014. Special Collections & Archives Department. Nimitz Library. United States Naval Academy.
Seagoing Slang: A Line on Bancroft Lingo. Annapolis, Md.: The Advertiser, 1922
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