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<div>At 3:06 PM -0400 9/24/01, Bapopik@AOL.COM wrote:</div>
<blockquote type="cite" cite> OED has 1960 and
1961. I was looking for "Ivy League," but don't tell
anybody that.<br>
From the NEW YORK SUN, 3 January 1935, Frank Graham's
sports column (this one about pro hockey), pg. 31, col. 1:<br>
<br>
_It Seems He Caught Normie "Deking."_<br>
(...)<br>
"Aw," said the little fellow, "I caught
you deking, else I wouldn't have been able to hit you like that.<br>
"How do you spell deking? Gee, I don't
know. I never saw it in print. I guess it's
d-e-k-i-n-g. Don't you know what it means? Well, when a
fellow is coming at you with the rubber and he tries to get you to
make your move first by shifting his feet or swaying his body, or
going like this with his stick, you say he is deking. When a
fellow is deking it's a cinch to knock him down because the chances
are he has one foot off the ice and is off balance."</blockquote>
<div><br></div>
<div>Wow. RHHDAS doesn't have anything for this
"deke" or the associated noun any earlier than 1960 (given
as a Canadianism, of course also in a hockey context), so Barry's
1935 (1935?) find is very impressive. The term is still used
quite freely in sports contexts, the locus classicus being for a
crucial moment in the 1991 World Series when the then rookie second
baseman Chuck Knoblauch of the Minnesota Twins deked Atlanta Braves
baserunner Lonnie Smith out of his...well, uniform on a hit to the
wall on which Smith could have easily scored what would have been the
winning (and only) run in the seventh and final game. Knoblauch
pretended to be about to field a throw at second base when the ball
was actually rolling around in (if memory serves) deep left
field. The well and truly deked Smith slid into third and the
game went into extra innings, the Twins finally winning the game 1-0
in the 10th and with it the Series.) </div>
<div><br></div>
<div>The origin is plausibly taken in RHHDAS to be a clip from
"decoy" attested earlier in hunters' lingo, and a quote is
included from Hemingway (1950) in which "deke" refers
literally to a duck decoy. If the athletes' "deke"
was really spawned by an earlier hunters' "deke" (for the
actual decoy), there should be pre-1935 cites for the latter.
Or perhaps they both developed independently as clips from
"decoy", with the sports nominal and verbal
"deke" getting there first.</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>Then there are the capital-D Dekes, the frat boys from DKE, but
there's no relation here. The earliest cite for that Deke
(Yale, 1871) spells it as "Deak" and has this puzzling (to
me) remark: "DKE men are often called 'Deaks' by the
others, but as this word is somewhat akin to an epithet it is not
employed in their presence". I can't figure out if the
implication was that there's a taboo association (but with what
epithet that sounds like it?) or that it's just used as a
semi-slur. There is evidently a bit of a reputation
problem; Mailer's<i> Naked and the Dead</i> has a reference cited
here to "a Cornell man, a Deke, a perfect asshole."</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>larry</div>
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