Dear Word Detective: I am curious about the origins of the Southern U.S. slang words “goomer” and “gomer.” I think they are insulting words, probably close to meaning “moron” or “slack-jawed yokel.” I have only seen them used in 1960s TV programs such as “The Beverly Hillbillies” and “The Andy Griffith Show” (and that show’s offshoot, “Gomer Pyle, USMC”). We’re not talking Faulkner scripts here, but still, I don’t believe the writers for these series came up with the words out of thin air; there probably is some basis in real language. I’ll be darned it I can find it. I suspect that the “gomer” is an offshoot of “goomer,” based on the dates of the TV programs’ creation. “GOMER” these days is an insulting term among medical personnel for a person who goes to the Emergency Room for no valid reason (standing for “Get Out of My Emergency Room”). I would suspect a Scottish or Irish root for the word, but again, darned if I can find it. Can you help? — Barb H.

Wow, flashback time. The shows you mention, along with “Petticoat Junction,” “The Real McCoys,” “Green Acres” and the “Andy Griffith” sequel “Mayberry RFD,” were staples of US television in the 1960s, a period when “rural sitcoms” were enormously popular. Set mostly in the American South (“The Beverly Hillbillies,” set in Beverly Hills, being an obvious exception), they portrayed small town life as simple, safe, and valuing family and tradition instead of the modern foibles of “city slickers.” Well, maybe. As a city slicker living the “Green Acres” lifestyle in rural Ohio the last few years, I’ve seen no lack of weirdness around here.

There seems to be a bit of debate over the origin of “gomer” (or its variant “goomer”) as a derogatory term meaning “stupid or inept person.” It first appeared in print in 1967 as military slang meaning “a clumsy or stupid trainee,” a sense almost certainly derived from Jim Nabor’s character Gomer Pyle, a dimwitted but sweet-natured garage attendant, on The Andy Griffith Show. Nabor’s character was spun off in 1964 to star in “Gomer Pyle U.S.M.C.,” wherein Gomer spent five years in training (bad sign right there) driving his drill instructor nuts with his ineptitude.

The proper name “Gomer” is rare but not unknown (there are two “Gomers” in the Bible, one of them a woman), but prior to Nabor’s TV portrayal there is no record of “Gomer” ever being used as a synonym for “idiot” or “yokel.”

The use of “Gomer” as hospital slang for an unwanted ER patient actually appeared in print a few years before the military usage, but most authorities also trace it to Gomer Pyle and “gomer” as slang for “fool.” The acronymic explanation (“Get Out of My Emergency Room”) shows signs of having been concocted after the fact (the explanation didn’t show up in print until 1978) and is considered implausible. Among other problems, it’s very unlikely that an imperative verb phrase (“Get out…”) would be used as a slang noun (“Here comes that gomer again”).

So the writers of “The Andy Griffith Show” didn’t invent the name “Gomer,” but they probably did pick it for its rural sound (there have been suggestions that “Homer” was considered but rejected as over-used), and Jim Nabor’s talent as an actor did the rest.

Dear Word Detective: How did the phrase “how come” come to mean “why”? How come we needed a longer, less obvious way of saying “why” when we already have the word “why”? Is this a southern colloquialism, or do people everywhere use “how come?” to mean “why”? — Gary Henderson.

Now here’s an interesting coincidence. My wife, Kathy Wollard, just happens to write a weekly newspaper column called “How Come?” in which she answers science questions from inquisitive children (and many adults as well). She is, in fact, even as I write this, hunkered down in the next room, putting the finishing touches on the third “How Come?” book, which will join “How Come?” and “How Come? Planet Earth” (all published by Workman Publishing) in bookstores next fall. And that, kiddies, is how proper product placement is done. Maybe someday she’ll answer a question that has been bothering me for years: Do trees sleep? They must, right? But every time I ask she rolls her eyes and tells me to be quiet.

“How come?” is actually a very interesting phrase. It seems to have been an American invention of the 19th century, although similar forms date back several hundred years in English. The first appearance of “how come” in print dates to 1848, but since that was in Bartlett’s Dictionary of Americanisms and the phrase was described as being common at that time, it is almost certainly older. That was, after all, an age when slang and colloquial phrases were usually avoided, not memorialized, in print.

The basic sense of the verb “come” is, of course, “to move towards, approach” or “to arrive.” One of the specialized, and now archaic, meanings of “come” is “to happen,” as in the phrase “to come to pass,” reflecting the idea of a condition, time or event “arriving” (also found in such uses as “Come next summer, Dwayne Junior had better have a job”). “How,” used as an adverb modifying a verb (such as “come”), means basically “by what means?” or “for what reason?”

The final piece of the puzzle of “how come” is the fact that it is actually an abbreviation of a longer phrase, which, although not known with certainty, was probably “how comes it” or “how does it come,” meaning “how did this (event, condition, etc.) happen to be this way.”

“How come?” is, as you note, essentially synonymous with “why?”, but in popular usage it often serves a slightly different function. “How come?” carries a challenging, more emphatic tone than a simple “why?” would convey (“How come Jimmy never has to wash the dishes?”). Unlike “why,” “how come” strongly suggests that the questioner has already developed an opinion on the situation and has decided that something is not proper or fair.