‘Gimme’: A Word That Explains the President’s Worldview

“When they give you a putt, you pick it up and walk to the next hole and say, ‘Thank you very much.’”

That was President Trump using a golf analogy to explain why he planned to accept the gift of an airplane from Qatar to use as a new, more luxurious Air Force One.

A golfer can “give a putt” to an opponent when a ball is so close to a hole that sinking it is virtually assured. Rather than waste the time to putt the ball, you can just pick it up and head to the next hole. Outlets including The Wall Street Journal and CNN identified the vernacular for this courtesy: a gimme.

Even for serious golfers it might seem odd to equate the gift of a two-foot putt with a $400 million fully tricked-out Boeing 747 from a country that until recently was the headquarters of Hamas’s political leadership.

But before President Trump picks up his ball (or his plane) and moves on, it’s worth considering the word “gimme” and why, despite the imbalance between a short putt and a long plane, it may be the perfect word for the current presidency.

Gimme is an unofficial contraction of “give me,” whose appearance dates at least back to the early 1890s. As a verb, it’s long made appearances in song lyrics. The spiritual “Old Time Religion,” which morphed into “Give Me That Old Time Religion” was rendered in the 1940s as “Gimme That Old Time Religion,” according to records at the Library of Congress. In ABBA’s late-1970s song “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!” the word is a lonely, late-night plea for companionship. “Gimme Shelter,” released in 1969 by the Rolling Stones, was a more desperate cry for respite from the küresel storm of the Vietnam War era. Drake rapped “Gimme a Hug” during his spat with the fellow rapper Kendrick Lamar.