When my father worked at a Geological Survey laboratory in the early to middle 1950s, "grundoon" was a common facetious term for a small child. This was about the peak of the baby boom, so the term must have received a lot of use. I had supposed that "grundoon" was somehow related to "grandson", for I first heard it in relation to my father's grandson. In fact, the term came from Walt Kelly's comic strip Pogo, and the Grundoon was a baby groundhog.
When I first encountered the original Grundoon, in the book I Go Pogo, it was clear how the expression had caught on. One notices two qualities of the Grundoon: he is always asleep, and he is always utterly limber, draped over someone's forearm. Newborns spend most of their time sleeping, and they are very limber. It is true that few of them have the fine head of hair, something like Elvis Presley's, that I recall the Grundoon as having.
This came to mind at the sight of a neighbor's daughter, just two months old, and sometimes to be seen toted in a sling, curled up. We have met seldom, and so far I think she has been asleep or drowsy each time.
In Janet Lewis's novel The Invasion, Waub-ojeeg, a chief of the Ojibways along the western end of Lake Superior, and his son-in-law John Johnston, consider the infant Lewis Saurin Johnston:
One evening as the grandmother was taking the child back to his mother, his grandfather said, softly, affectionately, "Very soon he will be doing the only thing that Manabozho [a god of the Ojibways] could never do. You will be proud of him then."
"And what was that?" asked Johnston innocently.
"Manabozho could not put his toe in his mouth."
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