‘Geezer’ refers to an older person, almost always a man, whose behaviour is regarded as either eccentric or typically ‘elderly.’ So what’s that got to do with me, you ask?
Geezers make hilarious comedy. Some well-known American examples of ‘geezers’ are Grampa Simpson of the Simpsons, Grandad Freeman of the Boondocks, Albert in Steptoe & Son, etc.
Geezers are often – wrongly, I now growl defensively – depicted as irritable and cranky, at least mildly irrational, and mired firmly in the past. Hmph!
‘The metric system is the tool of the devil! My car gets 40 rods to the hogshead and that’s the way I likes it.‘ Grampa Simpson.
‘The best way to describe Grandad Freeman is that he is old yet unwise. He never accepts responsibility for his actions, nor does he learn any lessons’.
More Grampa Simpson: ‘Dear Mr. President, there are too many states nowadays. Please eliminate three. I am not a crackpot;’
Grandad Freeman is not exactly the best parental figure or influence (eg. he is perfectly fine with sneaking into movies without paying). He mutters, ‘I hate to see a child go unbeaten.’ To explain his grumpiness, his grandkids sing of him, ‘He’s just mad ’cause his ass is old!’
Albert Steptoe (with a beer on the coffin of his brother): ‘This is the first drink I’ve ever had on him;’ and, ‘Reading books leads to communism.’
The word geezer originally meant a person of any age, the criterion of ‘geezerhood’ being oddness. When it first appeared in the late 1800s, ‘geezer‘ simply meant eccentric in looks and/or behaviour. The root of ‘geezer‘ is ‘disguiser’ – a person who dresses up in costume for a masquerade or other occasion. To call someone a ‘guiser’ (pr. ‘geezer’) was to say that they were dressed and/or behaving as oddly as one might on Halloween, for example. Sometime around the 1920s ‘geezer‘ started to mean an older, eccentric man says The Word Detective.
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My kids mainly call me Daddy or Dad. When they say Da-ad I know they’re going to ask for money. Tom also uses Ballie and Pops. Of my extra daughters, Gugu calls me Pete, and Ziggy calls me Geezer. I cracked up inside when she first said it, but bit my lip. So Ziggy always calls me ‘Geezer’ – and spells it ‘Geyser.’
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