gonzo
The origin of the word gonzo is inextricably linked to writer Hunter S. Thompson, famed for his style dubbed gonzo journalism. Gonzo is a highly subjective, first-person style, characterized by distorted and exaggerated facts. Thompson first used the word in print in the 11 November 1971 issue of Rolling Stone:
But what was the story? Nobody had bothered to say. So we would have to drum it up on our own. Free Enterprise. The American Dream. Horatio Alger gone mad on drugs in Las Vegas. Do it now: pure Gonzo journalism.
Thompson explained where he got the term a year later in Stop Presses by R. Pollack:
I ask Hunter to explain...Just what is Gonzo Journalism?..."Gonzo all started with Bill Cardosa [sic],...after I wrote the Kentucky Derby piece for Scanlan’s...the first time I realized you could write different. And...I got this note from Cardosa saying, ‘That was pure Gonzo journalism!’...Some Boston word for weird, bizarre.”
Thompson was wrong about it being a Boston regionalism. More likely, it is from the Italian gonzo, meaning foolish, or the Spanish ganso, meaning goose or fool.
From Thompson’s usage, the term generalized to mean anything foolish or bizarre.
(Source: Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd Edition)
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Copyright 1997-2007, by David Wilton
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In the 2007 biography “Gonzo: The Life of Hunter S. Thompson” by Jann S. Wenner and Corey Seymour, Doug Brinkley disputes Bill Cardoso’s claim, and indeed seems to contradict Thompson’s own words in “stop Presses”. Brinkley states that Thompson’s appropriation of the word ‘gonzo’ resulted from his affinity for the 1960 song of that name by James Booker, stating that from 1960 to 1969 “Gonzo” was Thompson’s favorite song. He states that ‘gonzo’ was decades-old Cajun slang meaning “to play unhinged”.
However, in a February 2002 article by Greg Johnson in BluesNotes magazine, the author states that Booker named the song for a character from the film “The Pusher”. The 1960 film was based on a 1956 novel “The Pusher” by Evan Hunter (writing as Ed McBain). Towards the end of the novel it is revealed that the character called Gonzo received the nickname as a result of a mishearing of the word ‘gunsel’, a hired gunman.
Interestingly, ‘ganso’ and ‘gunsel’ seem to both have their origins in the Germanic ‘gans’, meaning goose, per the American Heritage Dictionary.