fully remove the speaking-hearing gadget from its spider-leg forks, untwisting some fathoms of cord from around the box and beneath your feet. It is his duty to keep the lineman supplied with materials and to look after his tools, and the term generally used for any tool or piece of material is gimmick.įrom a 1921 Telegraph and Telephone Age snippet: The "grunt" or the "ground hog" is the lineman's helper who supplies tools or materials, any such article being denoted by the term " gimmick."Ī 1925 Telephony snippet repeats these terms:
A "dinkey" is a small art used to carry the poles which are called "sticks," the dolly" is the board fitted with a roller for handling them and the "deadman" relates not to to funereal matters but to the forked tool which is used in hoisting poles into position. Puzzled, he appealed to the information bureau of the public-service companies and the words were interpreted to him as follows. "Grab the dinkey and dolly to see if the grunt has the deadman handy to get the stick." A Kansas telephone subscriber overheard the above order spoken by the lineman of a crew at work on an installation job.
STRANGE "LINGO" OF LINEMEN IS PUZZLE TO HEARER Gimmick was a term used in telegraphy in a similar way we might use the term gadget today for an arbitrary bit of equipment: a thingy, a wotsit, thingymajig, doodah or gromit.įrom the September 1925 Popular Mechanics: 1926 (in Maine & Grant's "Wise-Crack Dictionary," which defines it as "a device used for making a fair game crooked"), Amer.Eng., perhaps an alteration of gimcrack, or an anagram of magic.