strip "pididdle," anyone?

[Laurence Horn]

At 11:30 AM +0000 3/6/02, Lynne Murphy wrote:
>--On Tuesday, March 5, 2002 9:39 pm -0500 Richard Gage <rgage at INTRAH.ORG>
>wrote:
>
>>PIDIDDLE: a car with one functioning headlight.  Also, a roadtrip game
>>that
>>rewards the player who spots the pididdle first.  In my father's day,
>>the winner
>>got a kiss.  But these days, there's a variant called "strip pididdle."
>>Shouldn't
>>"pididdle" be in the OED?
>>
>To me, this was 'perdiddle' (western NY state).  I never saw it spelt, but
>we did pronounce it with a distinct 'r' in my family.  I knew variations
>with kisses (suggested by my parents) and punches (practiced by my
>brothers).  By this time (mid-70s) 'punch-bug' was around too.

I'm pretty sure I only ever heard "padiddle" in the Rochester of the
early 1960's, no -r-.  Maybe the rhotic version recalled by young
Lynne represents a reanalysis of us old-timers' original.  If you
were a young man walking with a young woman and called "padiddle"
first after spotting the one-eyed car, you were indeed entitled to a
kiss, at least in principle.  I heartily endorse the concept of strip
padiddle, but I don't think the era or the climate would have been
favorable to its development in my Rochester years.

On the spelling:  the "padiddle" version corresponds to my underlying
orthographic form, but I admit I didn't often see it in print; if I
did, it would have been in some obscure short fiction piece, and I'm
pretty sure it would have had the "padiddle" form, or I'd have been
struck by the anomaly.  FWIW, google's "padiddles" outnumber its
"pididdles" 220-73, but I didn't check to see if all the hits are
relevant ones.

larry