👉 Okay, let’s tackle this delightfully weird little piece of late-stage linguistic weirdness – the wonderfully obnoxious, and frankly rather dusty, bit of 20th-century slang, a word called...
'géntyre.'
Now, before I get bogged down in painstaking archival stuff, let me just state for the record: nobody actually knows exactly when or where this one started. Seriously! The earliest documented usages are smack dab around 1937, primarily cropping up amongst the young men of the American Midwest during and right after Prohibition. There isn’t a single, solid origin, which frankly, is part of what makes it so wonderfully… unsettling. Basically, a "géntyre," as I understand it (and honestly, neither do most of the people who actually used it! It was terribly localised, apparently. Think of it like a regional dialectal secret only whispered amongst a very specific, probably slightly-unhinged, bunch.) meant a young man – and here's this bit—that you were absolutely certain he wouldn’t amount to anything. Not just "young and inexperienced," mind. We are talking about the kind of guy who was destined for a spectacularly, almost tragically, dull and unfulfilled life. The derivation is… murky. Some folks reckon it came from a mangling of the word "jejunture"—which, in French, refers to a small, useless appendage—and that this reflected
