Re: The English word galoot.

Just this Wednesday, Aidan Kehoe puzzled about:

One of my regular daily reads described Brian Wilson as a “huge all-American
galoot who is emotionally sensitive to the point of fragility.”

I can see that.  Defined the Beach Boys sound but then went on alone, partly to explore that sensitivity.

>
I know the word and it’s not used much, so that prompted me to look up the
etymology; OED2 doesn’t give any etymology, for its first definition it says 1.  Naut. (See quot. 1867.), which is:
>
“1867 Smyth Sailor’s Word-bk., Galoot, an awkward soldier..A soubriquet for the young or ‘green’ marine.”
>
Earliest citation there is from 1812, “Galloot, a soldier”. >
Wiktionary, to my mild surprise, says:
“From Quranic Arabic جالُوت (jālūt, pronounced galūt in Egyptian Arabic),
proper name equivalent to English Goliath, giant warrior of the ancient
Philistine ethnicity; cf. connotations of derogatory uses of English
Philistine. Doublet of goliath.”
>
On searching Google books Anthony Liberman lists it as among his “Origin
uncertain” words, but describes that “as early as the thirteenth century, the
Italian word galeot(t)o ‘sailor: steersman on a galley’ became current in
French, German and Dutch, and acquired an additional sense, namely ‘pirate.’
Galeotto continued into Modern Italian and has, among others, a derogarory
sense, though not coinciding with that of English galoot.”
>
So, where did the word come from? Certainly not directly from Egyptian Arabic, given the British were there quite late in the nineteenth century and the word is attested from 1812. Dutch? I have cross-posted to nl.taal but it is not clear to me that this will be particularly helpful.

Interesting.  I can't help, because I've just accepted "galoot" as an informal, even dialectical term that seems to sound like what it means.
Popular in '30s Rom Coms  (gads, nearly a century ago!)
/dps
--
We’ve learned way more than we wanted to know about the early history of American professional basketball, like that you could have once watched a game between teams named the Indianapolis Kautskys and the Akron Firestone Non-Skids.   -- fivethirtyeight.com