Geoff Nunberg‘s pick for 2008’s Word of the Year — JOE. Give a listen. (The linguist can convey much more through the spoken word than in print):
In 1942, FDR’s vice president Henry Wallace made a famous speech where he described the 20th century as the Century of the Common Man, and for most of that period, the common man went by the name of Joe. The generic Joe Blow made his first appearance in the 1920s, to be joined later by Joe Schmo from Cocomo. And by the ’30s, Joe had replaced John and Jack as a generic word for a chap or a fellow, as in a good Joe or a regular Joe. Maybe that was because Joe seemed more ethnically inclusive and urban than John. Josephs have always been thicker on the ground in New York than in Arkansas.
G.I. Joe was popularized in 1942 by a comic strip in the Army weekly Yank. It quickly replaced Johnny Doughboy, a holdover from World War I, and since that period, Joe has always suggested blue-collar unpretentiousness. There was Joe Palooka, the good-natured boxing champ from a popular comic strip that went back to the ’30s. There was Jackie Gleason’s garrulous Joe the Bartender, and Josephine the Plumber, who was featured in long-running ads for Comet Cleanser in the 1960s. Joe Camel slouched onto the scene a few decades later, shooting pool or sitting on his motorcycle in a black leather jacket, always with a cigarette dangling from his split lip. Man or dromedary, you couldn’t imagine him as a Jeremy.
And Joe is compulsory for any politician who is called Joseph, particularly if he can claim modest roots. Hey, can I call you Joe? Actually, that’s sort of the idea. Joe Lunchpail appeared in the 1960s, and Joe Sixpack goes back to a 1970 Boston congressional race. At the time, some people heard it as a slur on Irish voters, but it caught on as a slightly jocular handle for ordinary, working-class Americans. Homer Simpson embraced the idea and upped the ante when he called himself a regular Joe Twelvepack.
Those are the voters both parties have been wooing since the late 1960s, but usually under oblique labels like silent majority, working Americans or the forgotten middle class. Before Sarah Palin, no national candidates had ever invoked Joe Sixpack by name, much less offered themselves as a representative of what Palin called the normal Joe Sixpack American. And then the constituency was unexpectedly personified in the form of an Ohio man who happened to go by his middle name of Joe and who worked in the canonical, 20th-century, blue-collar job. On top of that, he was also a dead ringer for Peter Boyle in his title role as a hippie-hating factory worker in the 1970 movie “Joe.” That was all pure serendipity. You can bet that nobody would have tried to make a campaign mascot out of Wurzelbacher if he had been Dwayne the Drywall Guy.
This post is dedicated to our own editor-in-chief, a decidedly uncommon Joe who has led his merry band of bloggers to some uncommon heights. It is with great thanks that I wish you all the best in the New Year Joe!