There was an interesting article in the Tribune about the word "gang." Unfortunately I couldn't find it online for people to access.

It reports that "gang," according to the OED, has roots related to "journey" or "go", and says this gibes with the OED's entry which lists journeying and other related words as definitions. The point of the article was that "gang" wasn't originally a pejorative word.

I looked "gang" up in the online OED, and indeed the first definition is "action or mode of going; way, passage." Yet, it said the etymology is from Old English "gang, gong," meaning "strong masculine," which would relate to "gang" in my opinion. There were other origins, too, including the cognate Old Norse "ganga", meaning "weak feminine, walking."

The "weak feminine" and "strong masculine" are so opposites so were they maybe referring the grammatical gender of the word?

Here is the entry in the OED:

quote:

Etymology: Old English gang, gǫng strong masculine = Old Frisian gong, gung, Old Saxon gang (Dutch gang), Old High German gang (Middle High German, modern German gang), Old Norse gang-r (Danish gang, Swedish gång), Gothic gagg-s < Germanic *gaŋgo-z, noun of action related to *gaŋgangang v.1, to go. Compare the cognate Old Norse ganga weak feminine, walking, course, gǫng neuter plural, a passage, lobby (from which some of the English senses may possibly be derived)

Yes, the OED refers to grammatical gender, which shouldn't be confused with sexual attributes. The "weak feminine" refers to Old Norse, not English, anyway.

"strong" and "weak" are just terms for different noun classes.

Might this explain the expression, "gung-ho?"

In Germanic philology, strong and weak (German stark and schwach) refers to what we call regular and irregular word classes. In verbs look, looked is regular (or in the older terminology, weak), while sing, sang, sung is irregular (or strong).

Hence gangplank and gangway, I suppose.

Okay, thanks. It sure took awhile to get to the definition then.

For the record, I liked the old online OED better than this revised version. Unless you use it all the time, it's hard to get to the right place. There's just too much information all over the place. I liked the long list of definitions in the old version as you could follow how they changed.