"bulldyke" shortened from "bulldog-like"?

[Douglas G. Wilson]

>>... So how about:"bulldike" arose by shortening from
>>"bulldog-like" to indicate a tough/determined/masculine/aggressive
>>lesbian? Then with varying spellings and other alterations:
>>"bulldyke, bulldyker, bulldagger, bulldicker, dyke, bull." ....

>This strikes me as dubious, especially without further documentation,
>although no more so than other derivations that have appeared in
>print, notably Judy Grahn's attempt to derive "bulldyke" from Queen
>Boadicea ....

I like the Boadicea story, at least better than any other I was able to
find or invent. Of course my Boadicea story is not like Grahn's (I didn't
see hers until after I'd developed mine BTW). I picture
"Boadicea"/"Boudicca" mispronounced "boe-dika" or so being used as a
short-lived metaphor analogous to "Amazon" meaning "man-like woman" at some
point around 1900, encouraged perhaps by publicity surrounding Victoria's
Jubilees and/or Victoria's death (the statue of Boadicea in a chariot was
erected in London near Parliament in 1902, for example, and in my recent
CoE item I noted a Web example of a small memorial showing Boadicea and
Victoria [and other great Queens] which was apparently erected in
conjunction with the Jubilee of 1897).

The problem with most stories is that the basic noun form (according to the
available record) is not "dyke" or even "bulldyke" but rather "bulldyker",
and it is this (or the implicit verb "bulldyke") which one should derive
(more clearly so following Fred Shapiro's big antedating). Of course it's
possible that a big chunk of the record is missing, but "dyke" is not
easily plausibly derived either in my opinion (there are a lot of available
stories for this short word, but all the stories seem to be lousy).

I consider the following to be plausible:

(1) "bulldyker" from a modern personal name, perhaps a surname such as
Bodiker (I couldn't find a candidate person);

(2) "bulldyker" from "Boadicea"/"Boudicca" as above;

and maybe

(3) "bulldyker" from an apparently unattested "bull-diker" meaning
"male-dresser" where the verb "dike" here is the one used in "dike up" =
"dress up" (a problem here is that this "dress up" seems to have usually
been like "dress up in one's best clothes" rather than "dress up in
disguise or costume"; also parallel cases of "dike" in similar
constructions [which might be 'innocent' ones] apparently are lacking).

Less plausible, but amusing (to me):

(4) "bulldyker" from "bulldogger" (the story here might involve some
schoolboys admiring a piece of ancient Hellenic pottery with a picture of
scantily clad women performing some kind of acrobatics with a bull:
bulldoggers of Lesbos, maybe).

And of course there's always a "null hypothesis" on the order of "fanciful
construction".

-- Doug Wilson