The Wordorigins.org staff lollygagging on the balcony instead of working. From front to back: Charles, Lila, and Erik.
16 April 2021
Lollygag is originally an Americanism, and today it is generally used to mean to dawdle, move slowly or engage in idle play when something needs to be done. But it has a second meaning, less common but still found today, meaning to flirt, neck, snog, or otherwise engage in lovemaking. In early use, it is often spelled lallygag, but that spelling has all but vanished today.
The word appears in the mid nineteenth century, but other than the date the origin is not known for certain. There are several possibilities, however. Loll in northern English dialect relates to the tongue (Cf. lollipop) and can be used as a verb meaning to embrace or neck. The verb loll can also mean to droop, dangle, rest idly, or thrust out the tongue. This last can be seen in Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, one of his later plays written sometime before his death in 1616:
No blame be to you sir, for all was lost,
But that the heauens fought: The King himselfe
Of his wings destitute, the Army broken,
And but the backes of Britaines seene, all flying
Through a strait Lane, the Enemy full-hearted,
Lolling the Tongue with slaught'ring: having worke
More plentifull then Tooles to doo't: strooke downe
Some mortally, some slightly touch’d, some falling
Meerely through feare, that the strait passe was damm’d
With deadmen, hurt behinde, and Cowards liuing
To dye with length’ned shame.
The gag in lollygag may also relate to the mouth, or it may relate to the sense of a joke or idle amusement.
Whether or exactly how loll and gag came together isn’t known, but one can easily see the relationship between the tongue and snogging or hanging about idly, amusing oneself rather than doing work.
The earliest appearance of the word seems seems to have the meaning of no worth, nonsense, foolery. From a poem about a dead milk cow that appears in the Sparta Democrat on 14 September 1859:
22 Kwarts of milck she give,
As true as Eye dew liv,
but now er 12 Kwart bag
Aint wuth a lallygag,
Poor old thyng!
The senses of snogging and dawdling both appear in print at about the same time, so we cannot say which came first. The dawdling sense appears in Harper’s Magazine in August 1862:
Over the door was stretched a line of letters, reader “RESTERANT;” while below the counter a label fluttered in the breeze, bearing on it, “1000 able-bodied men wanted immediately, to drink Swingle’s Lager Beer. Non but those having the spondulix need apply.” It was before this place that Mr. Biggs paused and turned the flesh of the succulent lobster over with his finger. The gentleman inside addressed him:
“Well now, bossy, what kin I do for you? Try er lobstaw, bossy?”
“Ain’t got no money,” said Mr. Biggs, still fingering the morsels.
“Oh, come now, none o’ that ere lallygag,” responded the gentleman. “Go in, bossy!”
Mr. Biggs raised a morsel to his lips, tasted, smacked them, and swallowed it. He gazed a moment on the dish and then turned away.
In the above passage, lallygag would seem to mean hanging about, loitering, but the context of tasting a succulent piece of lobster is not completely divorced from oral activity and the tongue. The shopkeeper is telling Biggs to either stop loitering or not taste the food.
Another early use that on its face means to dawdle, but whose phrasing hints at snogging, is this from Iowa’s Northern Vindicator newspaper of 19 February 1870. The denotation here is clearly that of winter dawdling and refusing to give way to spring, but lollygag in the lap also conjures up the image of someone reclining next to their lover. We also see the < o > spelling in this passage:
The weather once more is “salubrious” and balmy, and indicates that winter will not lollygag in the lap of spring.
By 1879 we see the dawdle sense with no implication of lovemaking. From the Kalamazoo, Michigan Daily Gazette of 27 December 1879:
“When I worked on a farm,” said a young man, “one old farmer, when he drove his team would exclaim to his horses in this manner: ‘Wheet! (whistle) you old cow! wheet, you old cow!’ as he rattled the lines over their backs. Another would hurry his horses with this epithet: ‘Hate (haste, probably), you old lallygag! hate, you old lallygag!’ Another encouraged his horses with a little profanity, in this style: ‘Gee-up you darned old h—llyon!” The last, an impatient old man who hated to swear would remind his horses of the slowness by sneering: ‘Just look at ye now! just look at ye now!’ So when I drove a team I put all these together and rattled it off in this manner:
Hate, you old lallygag,
Wheet, you old cow,
You darned old h llyon.
Just look at you now;which so astonished my horses that they sprung into a gallop whenever they heard it.
We also see the sexual sense appearing in the 1860s. This next example uses lallygag as a fictional street name, but the context is of the birds and the bees and unwanted pregnancies. From the New York Atlas of 15 November 1862:
Although experience an Mrs. B. hev somewhat shaken his belief, yet I think I’ll hev to go back tu it, bein convinced that the Doctors do bring babies, and also that it aint alwus sartin where they belong: an I’ll tell you why. It wur on a butiful skylight evenin that a dubble ring wur herd in our boardin-hous, in Lallygag Place, (no number on the house) an when Bridget went tu the door about an hour after, she diskivered on the stoup a baskit containin a large amount of cry.
And in a 15 July 1867 police blotter in the Savannah Daily Republican, lallygag is connected with prostitution. The use of Frank as a name for a woman seems quite odd to us today, but, while never exactly common, in the nineteenth century a woman using that name wasn’t so unusual as to attract notice:
Frank Benn is a rather pretty quadroon girl, who trips the light fantastic toe of a moonlight eve, through the parks, and catches time as it flies. She is a noted lallygag, and was caught talking to the men. We pitied Fanny, for she is pretty enough to be a better girl. His Honor instructed the police to arrest any notorious women in the streets, after nightfall, talking to men. We are glad to see our suggestions are being carried out. The detectives know these girls well, and they will be watched and arrested.
And in another piece from the Northern Vindicator of 30 December 1868, there is no dancing about:
The lacivious [sic], lolly-gagging lumps of licentiousness who disgrace the common decencies of life by their lovesick fawnings at our public dances, wol’d better subserve the purposes for which nature designed them, by placing themselves in some drug establishment to fill prescriptions requiring emetics.
Lallygag appeared in the context of billiards in a New York World piece from 24 November 1870, but even here it is equated with a kiss:
In Dion’s seventh inning—as rapid and exquisite playing as ever seen at our American exhibitions—he scored the enormous run of 372, during which he made four double shots in succession, playing the balls alternately in the two lower corners of the table. He had the balls in good condition still, but by a kiss, or “lallygag,” as he expressed it, the cue ball failed to carom.
And there is this piece that appeared in the Pittsburgh Daily Post on 9 January 1872. From its tone and style, it appears to be fiction (it was not unusual for newspapers of the day to print poems and short fiction), but it’s presented as if it were a news story from England. Lloyd Fletcher was falsely convicted of the murder of Charles Lancaster, and here he is being visited by the wife of the man he supposedly murdered. Just prior to this passage he had just been visited by his wife, and they had embraced, the turnkey describing them as “a pair of cooing doves.” So, the sense of lallygagging here is clearly in the sexual one. I apologize for the length, but the melodramatic plot twist is worth it. The passage opens with the jailor speaking to Fletcher:
“I’ve brought another gal to see you this time, Fletcher. It’s very probable she won’t be so agreeable-like as t’other one, but will do you as much good, I reckon.”
A woman in black stood before the bed on which Fletcher reclined. He recognized Mrs. Lancaster, the wife of the murdered man.
“Ah, this does me good,” said she, taking a step nearer and shaking her clenched fist in his face. “It does not pay to take a fellow creature’s life, does it? Don’t you speak to me, you villain—dont dare to open your mouth. I came here to gloat over your misery, and see how the prospect of leaving your wife and babies affected you. Oh, you tremble! I have found the tender chord. My husband’s wife and children were nothing—oh no! Wretch, villain! may the law be fully justified!
The woman, to all appearance, exasperated beyond the power of further utterance, stepped nearer, and, with a sly movement, hid one of her gloves under the pillow of the bewildered man.
“Have you finished, ma’am,” inquired the turnkey, with his hand on the door.
“Now, really, Fletcher, dont you rather prefer an interview of this kind to one of those lallygagging sort you have had so many of lately? ‘Twill do you more good—ten to one. What are you doing now?”
“Giving him one more look, that is all. Murderer! robber! wretch! I want to engrave his picture on my brain so indelibly that I can never forget a single feature.”
“By the crown, you old man must have had a Tartar! Oh, ho, ho, ho! and the fat turnkey shook his fat sides with laughter. “I don’t believe he’s got it much better where his is staying now than he had with you. It takes a woman to use up the King’s English. I always said so, no I know it.
Mrs. Lancaster drew her veil over her face, and quietly left the prison. As soon as he dared, with trembling fingers, Lloyd drew forth the glove. In it was a vial containing a mixture of chloroform or ether, a small sharp instrument to file his shackles, and a note. It read thus:
You are not the man, and I cannot allow you to be hung. Overpower the keeper, take his clothes, and leave Go to the old rookery. No.—first floor where a disguise awaits you, and then God help you, for you must conceal yourself.
Fletcher does escape, the real murderer eventually found, and Fletcher is vindicated.
There is this from the 18 July 1875 issue of Philadelphia’s Sunday Dispatch that uses the phrase lallygag rhymes to refer to songs with licentious lyrics:
Now over to the other side—“sentimental” sketches and lallygag rhymes: “Sonnet to a Sick Stepmother;” “Ode to Despair;” “How She Jilted Him;” “My Ugly Old Wife and my Pretty Young Housekeeper;” Thrice Divorced;” The Seducer’s Victim;” “How is That for High?” “Nasty, but Nice!” and quite a considerable of similar continuation, far too foul for repetition.
Of such is the soul-debasing stuff dealt out to soft men, silly women, apothecaries’ apprentices, schoolboys, developing girls, and giddy factory-hands, in city, town, village, hamlet, or homestead, over length and breadth of the land! Fathers and mothers, much too pious to admit a “novel” within their doors, will subscribe for and supply to their children unending duplication of such Press Gang muck!
And this from Ohio’s Democratic Northwest of 30 March 1882:
Those “pot-wrestlers” are far more wealthy than the silk arrayed and diamond decked parrot miss with whom you were lollagagging a short time ago at your employer’s show-case. What could you do to support her or any other woman?
Finally, we get sex and politics in Oklahoma’s Daily Leader of 28 January 1894:
There was a Republican love feast at the city hall last evening, and the way the advocates of the g. o. piseh[?] lolly-gagged and entwined their arms about each other’s neck, was a caution.
(The Newspaperarchive.com scan of this paper is not the best. While it is possible to read the words that use standard spelling, g. o. piseh (or whatever) defeated me. It’s clearly meant to be a jocular variant of G.O.P., but exactly how the editors are spelling it can’t be determined from the digital scan.)
Both senses of lollygag continue through to the present-day, in my experience the dawdling sense is the more common one today, but one can still find examples of the snogging or sexual sense.
Sources:
“Along the Wharves.” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, 25.147, August 1862, 324.
“Billiard Entertainment.” The World (New York), 24 November 1870, 5. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.
“The Blowhard Papers.” New York Atlas, 15 November 1862, 1. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.
Davies, Mark. The NOW Corpus (News on the Web), 2021.
Diggs, Sharp. “Snap-Short Sermons of an Uncalled Preacher.” Sunday Dispatch (Philadelphia), 18 July 1875, 1. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.
Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2021, s.v. lallygag, v., lallygag, n., lallygag, adj.
Hewitt, Hallet H. “Swearing at Horses.” Daily Gazette (Kalamazoo, Michigan), 27 December 1879, 2. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.
“Local Jottings.” Savannah Daily Republican (Georgia), 15 July 1867, 3. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.
“A Narrow Escape.” The Daily Post (Pittsburgh), 9 January 1872, 3. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.
Northern Vindicator (Estherville, Iowa), 19 February 1870, 3. Newspaperarchive.com.
———, 30 December 1868, 3. Newspaperarchive.com.
“Our Young Man Around Town.” Democratic Northwest (Napoleon, Ohio), 30 March 1882. 1. Newspaperarchive.com.
Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989 (updated December 2020), s.v. lallygag, v.
“Poetry.” Sparta Democrat (Wisconsin), 14 September 1859, 1. Newspaperarchive.com.
“Republican Love Feast.” The Daily Leader (Guthrie, Oklahoma), 28 January 1894, 1. Newspaperarchive.com.
Shakespeare, William. Cymbeline, 5.3. In Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies (First Folio, State Library of New South Wales). London: William Jaggard, et al., 1623, 392.
Wright, Joseph. The English Dialect Dictionary, vol. 3 of 6. Oxford: Henry Frowde, 1905, 643.
Photo credit: David Wilton, 2020.