doughnut

Painting of a seventeenth-century, Dutch woman holding a pot filled with oliebollen, a precursor to the present-day doughnut

25 August 2020

We all know that doughnuts, often spelled donuts, are sweet, toroidal cakes, stereotypically favored by office workers and police officers. As to the word’s origin, it’s obviously a compound of dough + nut. The dough part is obvious enough, but where does the nut come from?

The answer is that the doughnut was not always shaped like a torus. The first doughnuts were small, round balls of fried dough, resembling a large nut, what are today sometimes called a doughnut hole and marketed by Dunkin’ Donuts as a Munchkin or Tim Horton’s as a Timbit. The reason for the toroidal shape is to allow for a larger cake, which would not cook all the way through without the hole. The toroidal shape probably became common in the mid nineteenth century.

The first known reference to a doughnut is from a 1782 New England diary entry of a Thomas Hazard. In the entry for 11 February, he makes note of have having eaten donotes. His other entries don’t typically refer to food, so it seems that doughnuts were unusual enough for him to make a special note. This would square with the common understanding that doughnuts originated with Dutch settlers in New York and finding them in New England in 1782 would have been unusual. His diary entry for 11 February 1782 reads:

C.W. w. made pr Bridle Bitts Fn Am helpt George make Plank Nails. went Down to haners hill to help up Cousin Hazards Coalt. George went to Tower hill. James Congdon was hurt by ahorse. Fried Donotes.

Other than that they existed, this brief mention doesn’t tell us anything about the doughnuts that Hazard ate. But several decades later, Washington Irving, in his 1809 History of New York does describe them and gives important clues as to their culinary origin:

Sometimes the table was graced with immense apple pies, or saucers filled with preserved peaches and pears; but it was always sure to boast an enormous dish of balls of sweetened dough, fried in hog’s fat, and called dough nuts, or oly koeks—a delicious kind of cake, at present, scarce known in this city, excepting in genuine dutch families; but which retrains its pre-eminent station at the tea tables in Albany.

Oliekoek, to use present-day spelling, is Dutch for oil cake. The round balls of fried dough are still served today in the Netherlands and Flanders, although today they are generally called oliebollen, or oil balls. They were brought to the New World by Dutch settlers in New York and the Hudson River Valley.

By the late nineteenth century, the toroidal cakes were so common that doughnut was being used to refer to anything that was toroidal. An early example of this sense comes from an 1884 article in an obstetrics journal describing the treatment for an inverted uterus, a rare, but serious, complication of childbirth. Like many descriptions of nineteenth-century medical treatments, this one is rather unnerving to present-day sensibilities. The first step in the treatment reads:

The method of treatment was as follows: A soft rubber doughnut pessary large enough to closely fit but not distend the vagina was tied to the end of a broom-stick which had been made smooth by sandpaper.

A doughnut can also be a circle formed by a controlled skid of an automobile. This sense is first recorded in the slang of California car culture in 1951. It appears in a glossary in the journal Western Folklore:

To peel a doughnut. To make a complete, fast turn.

So that’s where the nut came from and how teen hotrodders came to use the word.

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Sources:

Johnson, Frederick W. “Two Cases of Inversion of the Uterus Treated After Wing’s Method. The American Journal of Obstetrics and Diseases of Women and Children, vol. 17, 1 August 1884, 815. ProQuest.

Hazard, Thomas B. Nailer Tom’s Diary. Caroline Hazard, ed. Boston: Merrymount Press, 1930, 29. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Irving, Washington (as Diedrich Knickerbocker). A History of New York, vol. 1 of 2. New York: Inskeep and Bradford, 1809, 149. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2018, s.v. doughnut, n.

Van Dorn, Douglas. “Jalopy Slang.” Western Folklore, vol. 10, no. 3, July 1951, 248. JSTOR Complete.

Image Credit: Aelbert Cuyp (1620–91), painted c. 1652, Dordrechts Museum, public domain image.

dork

24 August 2020

There are many slang euphemisms for the penis, and many of them go back centuries. The only surprising thing about dork is that it is relatively recent, only being recorded from the 1960s. The origin of dork is not known for certain, but it is probably a variation on dick. But while it is relatively new, the word developed in the same manner as many other slang terms for the male genitalia.

Dork is recorded in Jere Peacock’s 1961 novel Valhalla, but it is certainly older in oral use. The word appears in a conversation set in the early 1950s:

“Don’t start beatin’ your meat, lad,” the Negro said blandly. “We don’t allow that here.”
“Aww,” Butch said, “he couldn’t beat his meat. He ain’t got enough to beat.”
[...]
“You satisfy many women with that dorque?” the Negro asked in an unctuous voice. “Or you got to use your motherfucking hand all the time? Don’t look like you got enough to do much good with anything.”

The spelling dorque, which is not common elsewhere, hints that the term was new; either the spelling hadn’t yet standardized or Peacock had heard the term but not seen it in writing. But there is an earlier instantiation of the dorque spelling in a different sense. Louie the Dorque was a fictional U.S. Army soldier, and since Peacock’s novel is also about the military, albeit the Marines, it is possible that he was familiar with the character. The 9 February 1945 Stanford Daily has this:

Louie the Dorque nervously dealt the pasteboards [....] The situation wasn't helped when a pair of aces slipped from the Dorque's sleeve and rattled noisily on the board.

While it is possible that Peacock got his spelling from Louie the Dorque, the character is unlikely to be the source of the slang term in general.

Within a few years, dork is recorded as also having the meaning of a fool or pathetic person. From the Wisconsin State Journal of 17 January 1965:

The guy will return to Langdon st. if he is a “frat-rat,” or to one of the University Residence Halls if he is a “dorm-dork” or one who lives in a dormitory.

This shift in meaning is common for slang terms for the penis, many of eventually become general epithets for a person.

The sense of dork meaning a nerd comes a few decades later. From the pages of the National Lampoon of February 1984:

But where the sci-fi dorks could only stutter and drool at the comic-book conventions in inchoate rage, the intellectuals determined to rally to the Surfer's support.

Each of the noun senses also developed a verb sense to go along with them. To dork, meaning to have sexual intercourse, dates to at least 1970 and Ed Sanders’s counterculture novel Shards of God:

Many women, once dorked by the android, prayed to the Lord for even just thirty seconds more of the frenzied inner curlings and wrigglings of the clitorooter.

The sense to treat someone as a dork, that is badly, appears in 1969 in Hal Higdon’s book about management consultants, The Business Healers:

If any partner, for any reason, consciously or unconsciously dislikes a candidate, he can dork him [....] The job candidate will be thanked for his time but will not be asked to return.

And the sense to behave like a fool or a nerd, usually in the form to dork out, is in place by 1990 in Whitley Streiber’s Billy:

He was a nice guy, but he could dork out at a moment's notice. He had just dorked out.

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Sources:

Bednarek, David. “UW Slang Makes ‘Smash’ a Kissing Success.” Wisconsin State Journal (Madison), 17 January 1965, 2. NewspaperArchive.com.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2020, s.v. dork, n., dork, adj., dork, v.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2019, dork, n., dork, v.

Peacock, Jere. Valhalla. New York: Dell, 1967, 339. The Internet Archive.

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.