Well-read antiquarians discovered the exclamation in the works of Jonathan Swift and Oliver Goldsmith. This etymology was obviously offered tongue in cheek. In a footnote, Barnham explained that Gengulphus’s name had given rise to the exclamation by Jingo. Gengulphus is buried, but, when people open “the casement,” the body appears whole and he “looks as sound as a trout.” The tale ends with a description of many miracles attributed to the murdered man and the advice to travelers not to stay away from their wives for too long. When he falls asleep, they strangle him, and the villainous clerk wounds him in the thigh. In the evening, she and the priest’s “clerk” see to it that Gengulphus eats and drinks too much. The story tells of a priest who traveled to the Holy Land and returned, greeted with suspiciously exaggerated tenderness by his wife. Gangulphus, rendered in English as Gengulphus or Gengolphus.
Today even English professors rarely open those versified tales, but they are delightful reading, due to the author’s humor, skillful rhyming, and an occasional sprinkling of slang. He made use of it in The Ingoldsby Legends, which were published serially in 1837 and ended up in thousands of homes in the book editions of 18.
The exclamation by jingo was known to Harris Barham. The end of it was: “Now is not this a sweet little song? / I swear it is, by Jingo! / J with an I, / I with an N, / N with G, / G with an O, / I swear it is, by Jingo!” This song has once been referred to in an attempt to explain the origin of the game (lotto) bingo. As early as 1861, a correspondent to Notes and Queries asked: “Who is apostophised by this very common exclamation?” In 1880, a man remembered that sixty or so years before the small boys sang a country song about a dog called Bingo. However, by jingo predates 1878 by centuries. After the siege of Plevna and the town’s surrender-the bloodiest battle of the Russo-Turkish war-in 1878 (see one of the pictures below), in every pub people sang the song that reached the streets from music halls: “We don’t want to fight, but, by Jingo, if we do, / We’ve got the ships, we’ve got the men, we’ve got the money too.” It is for that reason that the origin of Jingo and by Jingo suddenly aroused universal curiosity. Nowadays, jingoism “extreme and aggressive patriotism” and jingoist do not seem to be used too often, though most English speakers still understand them, but in Victorian England, in the late nineteen-seventies and some time later, the words were on everybody’s lips. Jingo has not written or published anything. The lines above look (and sound) like identical oaths, but that happens only because of the ambiguity inherent in the preposition by.
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