Home Gudgeon and gist Language Log Gyro, part 2

Gyro, part 2

Language Log 2024-09-28

There's a chain of about half-a-dozen fast food restaurants called Gyro Shack in Boise, Idaho, where I find myself now.  They're cool little shops, just as Boise is a cool (big-)little city spread across a broad, flat plain (nearly three thousand feet in elevation) that lies at the foothills of the Rocky Mountains.

Several things about gyros perplex me.  One is how the cones of meat on the vertical, rotating spit cohere and do not fall to pieces, but docilely hang in place oozing their mouthwatering juices waiting to be sliced off, layer after layer.  One traditional gyro meat recipe states:  "Processing the meat in the food processor and overworking it ensures that the proteins in the meat stick together, like sausage." (source)  I still don't get it, since sausage has a casing to hold it together.

Never mind about that physical matter for now,  What really bothers me (and lots of other people), is how to pronounce that four-letter word.

Some people say "hero", others pronounce it as in "gyroscope", one person told me to pronounce it like the name of the official currency of the European Union, and so on.

Here are some phonetic transcriptions:  /ˈjiː.ɹoʊ/, /ˈjɪɹoʊ/, /ˈʒɪɹoʊ/, /ˈd͡ʒaɪɹoʊ/

Audio recordings here.

Another puzzlement:  like so many classical, canonical foods of the Mediterranean (baklava, kebab, kofta, meze, taramasalata, etc., etc.), is gyro a Greek food or a Turkish food — or ultimately Arabic or Persian (and which way?), with a bit of Italian tossed (!) in?

Here's the etymology for  gyro:

Back-formation from the plural gyros, from Greek γύρος (gýros); from the turning of the meat on a spit (as a calque of Turkish döner into Greek). Doublet of gyre and gyrus.

(Wiktionary)

sandwich made from roasted lamb, 1971, originally in reference to the meat itself, as roasted on a rotating spit, from Modern Greek gyros "a circle" (see gyre (n.)). Mistaken in English for a plural and shorn of its -s.

(Etymonline)

Once Gyro Shack breaks out of Boise, it may become part of the giant fast food industry, or maybe, like Nebraskan-Eastern European runza, it will remain an ethnic, regional specialty — except that gyros are already everywhere as street food.  Somehow, they seem to resist industrialization and business models.  They are the niche food of niche foods.

 

Selected readings