Pylimitics

From 1951 to 1960 there was a BBC radio comedy called The Goon Show. It was a half-hour show starring Spike Milligan, Harry Secombe, and a name you’ve heard before, Peter Sellers. Each episode featured comedy skits (like Saturday Night Live), generally with weird plots and goofy sound effects. The Goon Show was vastly popular, and you can still buy recordings on CD or download many of them from The Goon Show Preservation Society, which has a website. 

One skit explained that there was a recent outbreak of a little-known disease: “lurgi.” “Lurgi,” by the way, is pronounced like “Fergie”, with a hard “g.” You could tell when someone was coming down with lurgi because one of the symptoms was yelling “eeyack-a-boo.” It turned out, as the plot progressed, that lurgi was really just a sham. The one preventive treatment that worked to protect you from “the most dreadful malady known to mankind” was to play a brass instrument like a trumpet or trombone. That was what revealed the sham; it was a ploy by the masterminds Goosey and Bawkes to sell more band instruments. 

Today, even though they have no idea where the term came from, school children in England, Australia, and New Zealand apparently still talk about catching “the dreaded lurgi,” even though it’s not quite clear what it is. 

The word “lurgi,” or “lurgy,” may have come from Army slang during the second world war. It originated in dialects from northern England — sometimes as “largie” or “lurden” — and meant lazy. Particularly if someone faked illness to avoid work, they might have “fever-lurgie.” On the other hand, there was a German company in the 1930s that developed a process to generate natural gas from coal — the company and its process were called “Lurgi.” Or it might have come from “allergy”, even though that word has a soft “g.” In any case, no one ever thought to ask Spike Milligan where he got the word, and he evidently forgot to explain it. Possibly an unreported symptom of the dreaded lurgi is forgetfulness.