Isegoria

I recently watched The Great Santini, and it opens with the titular protagonist leading his Marine aviators against Naval aviators in one-on-one dogfights, lining up their sights and declaring when they would take the kill shot. This seemed odd to me, because the setting was 1962, and the fighter jets were F-4 Phantoms — which did not have old-fashioned guns going into the Vietnam war. (That was one of the major points of Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War.)

Sure enough, the Phantoms were an update to the book:

The story, for the most part, follows the book. The movie’s major divergence is the absence of Ben Meecham’s Jewish best friend Sammy. The spelling of the family’s surname was also changed from Meecham to Meechum. Also changed is Meecham’s aircraft; in the book, he flies and commands a squadron of F-8 Crusaders, while in the film the fighters shown are F-4 Phantom IIs.

The F-8 was the last American fighter with guns as its primary weapon, earning it the title “The Last of the Gunfighters”.

The Great Santini exemplifies what we now call toxic masculinity, and his wisecracking older daughter compares him to Godzilla — which got me to look up the illustrious monster, who made his American debut in 1956:

Gojira is a portmanteau of the Japanese words: gorira (“gorilla”) and kujira (“whale”), owing to the fact that in one planning stage, Godzilla was described as “a cross between a gorilla and a whale”, due to its size, power and aquatic origin.

I was surprised when the oldest son’s high school basketball coach made a reference to — pardon my French — poontang, because I thought that was a term only popularized after Vietnam, but the term goes back decades:

1920s: alteration of French putain ‘prostitute’.

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