doozy

21 August 2020

A doozy is American slang for something that is first-rate, excellent. Like many slang words, we don’t know the origin for sure and probably never will, but we have a pretty good guess in hand. It’s most likely a variation on an older, British slang term, daisy.

Doozy first appears as an adjective in Al Kleberg’s 1903 Slang Fables from Afar:

As soon as the races were billed he began to involve Schemes—one Doozy scheme followed the other—fellow clerks put him on and he knew a man who could look at a horse and guess within one second of his or her time per 5280 feet.

The noun appears by 1916.

The older daisy appears as an exclamation in the 1757 play The Author by Samuel Foote. In the scene a man proposes a game similar to Questions and Commands, which is a variant of what we today call Truth or Dare:

Young Cape. Hold a Minute. I have a Game to propose, where the Presence of a third Person, especially Mr. Cadwallader’s, wou’d totally ruin the Sport.
Mrs. Cadwallader. Ay, what can that be?
Cape. Can’t you guess?
Mrs. Cad. Not I; Questions and Commands? mayhap.
Cape. Not absolutely that—some little Resemblance; for I am to request, and you are to command.
Mrs. Cad. Oh daisy! that’s charming, I never play’d at that in all my born Days; come, begin then.

The superlative adjective daisiest appears in 1847, in this piece about the ecological impact of the Industrial Revolution. But here it’s not clear if the slang sense is being used, or if the word is meant literally to mean filled with flowers, or perhaps both:

For them the over-arched and almost hidden stream, that, dye-discoloured, serves a thousand factories, should be more endeared than the brightest rill that gurgles waste and unimpeded through the daisiest of meadows.

We see an unambiguous use of daisy as an adjective meaning good or excellent in a poem appearing in an American railroad labor journal of November 1877:

But when it comes down to do work in a hurry,
A daisier brakeman you’ll never find;
And if you depend on him to do switching.
You need never fear you’ll come in behind.

And both daisest and daisy appear in the slang sense in another poem found in the Harvard Lampoon of 21 December 1883:

The charms of the damsel were being discussed
At luncheon, in grand old Memorial Hall;
Said Smith, as he nibbled away at his crust,
“She’s the daisiest daisy I’ve seen this whole Fall.”

So,it seems likely that doozy evolved as a variant pronunciation of this sense of daisy.

It’s worth touching upon two popular origin stories for doozy that are incorrect, or in one case doubtful. The first, which is incorrect, is that the slang term is clipping of Duesenberg, an American manufacturer of race cars and luxury automobiles. These cars were often affectionately dubbed Duesies or Doozies. But the company wasn’t founded until 1913, nearly a decade after the slang term had appeared. So, the nickname for the car was influenced by the slang term, not the other way around.

The second origin story associates doozy with actress Eleanora Duse (1858–1924). Duse was quite famous in her day, the period in which the term arose, and that she would inspire such a slang term is at least plausible on its face. But there is no evidence linking her to the term; it’s speculation without support, leaving the older slang term daisy as the only solid explanation.

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Sources:

“The Arcadia of this Age.” Douglas Jerrold’s Shilling Magazine, vol. 5, 1847, 136. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Foote, Samuel. The Author. Dublin: P. Wilson and W. Sleater, 1757, 19. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2020, s.v. doozy adj.

“Inversion.” The Harvard Lampoon, ser. 2, vol. 6, no. 6, 21 December 1883, 57. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Kleberg, Al. Slang Fables from Afar. Baltimore: Phoenix Publishing, 1903, 83. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

“A Lay of the Old ‘69.’” The Brotherhood Magazine, vol. 1, no. 12, November 1877, 376. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Oxford English Dictionary, Additions Series, 1993, s.v. doozy, adj. and n.

———, second edition, 1989, s.v. daisy, n.

dongle

A Bluetooth dongle attached to the USB port of a laptop computer

20 August 2020

A dongle is a device that plugs into a computer, smartphone, or other electronic device to provide some sort of additional functionality. Dongles can add Bluetooth or other wireless functionality, or they can be wired adapters to connect a printer or display. The Oxford English Dictionary says of the term’s origin that it is “apparently an arbitrary formation.” But that gives it short shrift. While the definitive origin is lost to the mists of time, there is a pretty solid guess and several more dubious explanations available.

The original dongle was an anti-piracy device to protect expensive pieces of software. The software would not operate unless the dongle was plugged into the computer. This use is recorded in the pages of New Scientist on 1 October 1981:

Many programs written for the Pet computer make use of a device known as a dongle. The dongle is an extra piece of memory that is plugged into the computer, without which the program refuses to run.

But within a decade dongle was being used for a wide variety of devices and adapters, not just the original anti-piracy device. From the magazine CU Amiga of April 1990:

With the addition of a plug-in Dongle the Amiga version will also feature a four player mode.

Unfortunately, these early uses provide no clue as to the word’s origin. The most likely explanation is that it is a blend of dong + dangle, with the device serving as a metaphor for a penis that hangs off the machine.

Megan Garber, writing in The Atlantic in 2013, gives a rather comprehensive run-down of the of the other possible explanations, which with one exception I will not repeat because they seem to be overreaching. The one exception is the claim that the device was invented by a certain Don Gall, who worked for the company Rainbow Technologies. The story is a creation of the company’s marketing department and has no basis in fact.

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Sources:

Garber, Megan. “The Origin of the Word ‘Dongle’: 7 Leading Theories.” The Atlantic, 29 July 2013.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2017, s.v. dongle, n.

Zimmer, Ben. “On Language: Corporate Etymologies.” New York Times Magazine, 30 April 2010.

Photo credit: Mmckinley, 2009, public domain photo.

doll / dolly

A nineteenth-century washing dolly, a stick with arms and legs used to agitate clothing in a washing tub

19 August 2020

A doll or dolly is an anthropomorphic child’s toy, often resembling a baby. A dolly also a wheeled platform that in no way resembles a human. How did one word come to have such different meanings? The answer lies in gradual additions and changes to what dolly could mean.

Doll and Dolly get their starts as a pet form of the name Dorothy, much like Hal is a pet name for Harry, Sall/Sally for Sarah, and Moll/Molly for Mary.

The name Doll dates to the sixteenth century, first recorded in Nice Wanton, an anonymous 1560 play:

But iche tell your minion doll, by gogs body:
It skylleth not she doth holde you as muche

Children back then, just as now, would name their toys, and the application of the name to a toy is first recorded in a 1699 slang dictionary:

Doll, a wooden Block to make up Commodes upon, also a Child’s Baby.

(The commode here is a cabinet or chest of drawers, not a toilet.)

The diminutive suffix -y is added to Doll by 1608, where it appears in Thomas Heywood’s The Rape of Lucrece in a song sung by Valerius which espouses the virtues of a number of women with different names:

When I dally with my Dolly,
She is full of melancholly,
Oh that wench is pestilent holy,
Therefore ile haue none of Dolly. No no no, &c.

Dolly appears as a generic term for a woman by the middle of the seventeenth century. From Robert Herrick’s 1648 A Lyrick to Mirth:

While the milder Fates consent,
Let's enjoy our merryment:
Drink, and dance, and pipe, and play;
Kisse our Dollies night and day:
Crown'd with clusters of the Vine;
Let us sit, and quaffe our wine.

By the late eighteenth century, the term dolly began to be applied to a wooden device used to agitate clothing in a wash tub. Because the device was a pole with handles that resembled arms and with legs to stir the clothes, it bore a vague resemblance to a person, or to a child’s doll. The term appears by 1793 in the magazine The Looker-On, written by William Roberts under the pseudonym Simon Olive-Branch:

The Dumb Dolly, or a machine for washing, is recommended by some lively remarks on the saving of time.

From there, dolly began to be applied to a wide variety of devices used for different purposes, and eventually lost its association with the human form in this context. The sense of a wheeled platform appears by the turn of the twentieth century. From Samuel Merwin and Henry Webster’s novel Calumet “K,” first published in 1901:

Gangs of laborers were swarming over the lumber piles, pitching down the planks, and other gangs were carrying them away and piling them on “dollies,” to be pushed along the plank runways to the hoist.

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Sources:

B. E. A New Dictionary of the Terms Ancient and Modern of the Canting Crew. London: W. Hawes, 1699. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Herrick, Robert. Hesperides. London: John Williams and Francis Eglesfield, 1648, 41. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Heywood, Thomas. The Rape of Lucrece. London: E. Allde for I Busby, 1608, fol. 16v–17r. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Merwin, Samuel and Henry Webster. Calumet “K” (1901). New York: MacMillan, 1905, 104. Hathitrust Digital Archive.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. doll, n.1.

A Preaty Interlude Called, Nice Wanton. London, John King, 1560, fol. 4r. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Roberts, William (Simon Olive-Branch). The Looker-On, no. 39. London: Thomas and John Egerton, 26 January 1793, 308. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Photo credit: Museum of Rural English Life.

dollar

1548 woodcut depicting silver mining in Joachimstal

18 August 2020

The dollar is the standard unit of monetary currency in the United States and several other countries, including Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, and Fiji. But where does the word come from?

Dollar is a clipping of Joachimstaler, which in turn is from Joachimstal (literally Joachim’s valley) in Bohemia, now Jáchymov in the Czech Republic. In 1519, a silver mine there started minting coins called Joachimstalers or simply Talers. The name taler was soon applied to a variety of coins minted throughout Europe.

The word makes its English appearance in a 1553 letter by Richard Morysin and Thomas Chamberlayne, in which they refer to the European coin:

The Duke of Wirtemberg is agreed w[ith] Magister Teutonici Ordinis, so that the Duke shall have for his charges 66000 dalers; but the King of Rome will not as yet agree w[ith] Wirtemberg: The sute is now seaven years old; thes Princes wold fain end it.

But of the various coins that took the name taler or dollar, the most significant for our purposes was the Spanish peso, also known as a piece of eight, because it was worth eight reals. Here is an early English language reference to this coin as a dollar in Barnabe Rich’s 1583 Riche His Farewell to Militarie Profession. Phillip refers to Phillip II of Spain:

Many of our yong Gentlemenne vseth now adaies, in the wearyng of their apparell, whiche is rather to followe a fashion that is newe (be it neuer so foolishe) then to bee tied to a more decent custome, that is cleane out of vse: Sometime wearyng their haire freeseled so long, that makes them looke like a water Spaniell: Sometymes so shorte like a newe shorne Sheepe: Their Beardes sometimes cutte rounde like a Philippes Daler: Somtimes square like the Kinges hedde in Fishestreate: Sometymes so nere the skinne, that a man might iudge by his face, the Gentleman had had verie pilde lucke

The Spanish coin circulated widely throughout both North and South America for several centuries, and by the time of the American War of Independence was the most common coin in circulation in the English North American colonies. As a result, in 1778 Thomas Jefferson drafted legislation authorizing the new government of the United States to issue banknotes based on the Spanish peso:

Be it enacted by the General assembly that it shall be lawful for the Treasurer to issue treasury notes in dollars or parts of a dollar for any sum which may be requisite for the purposes aforesaid in addition to the sums issuable by former acts of assembly.

Two-dollar U.S. Federal Reserve note

Six years later, in April 1784, Jefferson would suggest dollar as the name for the country’s own coinage:

The Unit, or Dollar, is a known coin, and the most familiar of all, to the minds of the people. It is already adopted from South to North? has identified our currency, and therefore happily offers itself as a Unit already introduced.

(The Oxford English Dictionary gives 1782 as the date for this note by Jefferson, and it also has a different volume and page number of Jefferson’s Works. There is clearly an error somewhere, but whether it is by the OED or by Ford, the compiler of the edition of Jefferson’s Works that I consulted, I cannot tell. In any case, there is no disputing the text or authorship of the quotation, only the exact date.)

So, the almighty dollar gets its name from a sixteenth-century silver mine in an obscure valley in what is now the Czech Republic, via the Spanish colonial empire.

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Sources:

Jefferson, Thomas. “Draft of a Bill for Providing a Supply for the Public Exigencies,” 20 May 1778. In Paul Leicester Ford, ed., The Works of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 2 of 12, New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1904, 327. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

———. “Notes on the Establishment of a Money Unit, and of a Coinage for the United States,” April 1784. In Paul Leicester Ford, ed., The Works of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 4 of 12, New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1904, 300. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Morysin, Richard and Thomas Chamberlayne. “Letter to the Privy Council” (1553). In Edmund Lodge, Illustrations of British History, Biography, and Manners, vol. 1 of 3, London: C. Nicol, 1791, 166. Google Books.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. dollar, n.

Rich, Barnabe. Riche His Farewell to Militarie Profession. London: J. Kingston for Robart Walley, 1583. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Image credits: “Bergwerk Sankt Joachimsthal,” Wikimedia Commons, public domain; U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing, 2003.

dirt poor / filthy rich

17 August 2020

Dirt poor is an expression that dates to the late nineteenth century United States. It means, of course, very poor. But why the dirt?

It would seem the phrase originally referred to a farmer who owned their land, perhaps with a mortgage, but had little actual cash on hand. In this way, it would be akin to the present-day house poor, referring to someone who owns a nice home, but because of mortgage payments has little in the way of discretionary funds.

The concept, but not the phrase itself, can be seen in this line, which appeared in the Press and Daily Dakotaian of 2 July 1883. Bismarck here refers to the city, now the capital of North Dakota, not the German politician:

Bismarck is rich in prairie dirt, but poor in actual legal tender.

A few months later in the Chicago Daily Tribune of 14 October 1883, the phrase appears in a headline:

“Dirt Poor.” A Board of Trade Scalper Dabbles in Printing-Company Stock, with Bad Results.

The article, which does not use the phrase itself, is about an investor who swaps valuable stock for worthless land, and so dirt poor here literally refers to worthless land, not a state of poverty. But the fact the phrase is in quotation marks hints that the editors are engaging in word play, and the phrase dirt poor was already in oral circulation and known to their readers.

The earliest use I have found of dirt poor clearly used to mean very poor is from a May 1890 story, “Mark’s Substitute,” by Velma Melville. The relevant passage is about a man who pays for a substitute to take his place in the Union Army during the U.S. Civil War and later regrets it. The story was syndicated and appears in a number of newspapers across the United States:

“I bet if I was him I’d enlist first chance now ‘nd get my money back,” he continued.
“Everybody ain’t so fond of a dollar, nor so itchen for a fight as you be,” responded his wife, in the shrill treble she always used in addressing him.
“I ain’t no coward, none of the Moselys be,” he retorted.
“Neither be the Weidmans, Dick Mosely, but they’ve got sense enough to look out for number one. They ain’t dirt poor.”

Another early use from a syndicated story can be found in Mary Glascock’s 1893 “Under the Pines,” which again connects the phrase to a farm:

Me and mother farmed our ground ourselves and we’ve always been dirt poor; but me and Bill was always happy.

The bit of internet lore titled “Life in the 1500s” has been floating about cyberspace for decades. It claims that dirt poor dates to Elizabethan England where finished floors could only be afforded by the wealthy. This claim, like everything else in the piece, is utterly false.

Dirt poor is also not directly related to filthy rich. The use of filthy as an intensifier meaning extremely and offensively so is older. Filthy drunk dates to at least June 1827, when the Messenger for the Holston Conference reprinted the following from the New York Enquirer (I haven’t been able to find the original piece):

Within the present week, in a village not many miles from this city, at noonday, we saw two individuals staggering through the middle of the street most filthy drunk. Upon enquiry, we learned that one was about the wealthiest person in the place, worth considerably above $100,000, and that the other was the Postmaster! Can any thing be more shameful?

But filthy rich doesn’t appear until 9 November 1905, when it appears in the Iola Daily Register (Kansas):

It may be just as well hereafter not to wonder who those filthy rich people are speeding by in the ski-doodle cart.

It’s possible, of course, that the coining of filthy rich was influenced by the earlier dirt poor, but the older use of filthy as an intensifier indicates that it was not coined entirely in opposition to dirt poor.

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Sources:

“‘Dirt Poor.’ A Board of Trade Scalper Dabbles in Printing-Company Stock, with Bad Results.” Chicago Daily Tribune, 14 October 1883, 16. ProQuest.

Glascock, Mary Willis. “Under the Pines.” Overland Monthly and Out West Magazine, vol. 22, no. 128, August 1893, 151. ProQuest.

“Intemperance.” Messenger for the Holston Conference (Knoxville, TN), 16 June 1827. ProQuest.

Melville, Velma Caldwell. “Mark’s Substitute: A Decoration Day Sketch.” The True Northerner (Paw Paw, MI), 28 May 1890. Library of Congress: Chronicling America.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2016, s.v. filthy, adj., n. and adv.

Press and Daily Dakotaian (Yankton, Dakota Terr., SD), 2 July 1883, 1. Library of Congress: Chronicling America.