FW: Antedating of "Doofus"

[Frank Abate]

At the risk of upsetting people that I like and respect, let me comment on a
point that Fred S raises below re (RH)HDAS . . .

The presence of "citations" such as that for _doofus_ in the Lighter dict
("remembered from Jonathan Lighter's childhood") gives me pause, and raises
an issue that troubles me about slang dictionaries that rely on citational
"evidence".  Clearly from this example, HDAS is not rigorously researched in
some places, and given the essentially oral nature of the subject matter --
slang -- in some ways it cannot ever be so.  In fact, Richard Spears (one of
the top slang lexos in the US) wrote a quite critical review of the RHHDAS
when its first volume came out, and made a similar point.  Others objected
to what Spears had to say, out of respect, I think, for the monumental
effort of Lighter.  However, Spears's point should not be overlooked, I
think.

The trouble with a "historical dictionary" of slang is that it can never
fulfill its stated purpose.  Examples of slang can lurk in the language for
years, sometimes many years, without ever getting into print.  I cannot
prove the following statement, but I strongly suspect that very many slang
expressions have been born, lived, and died without EVER getting into print,
and are lost forever once their speakers are dead.  Those that do get
recorded are "lucky" to have been picked up by someone who happened to be
writing something, whether a novel, a newspaper story, a dictionary, or
whatever.  In many cases the slang expression may have been around for
years, even decades, meaning that the dated citation, or a personal
recollection, is really not "historical".  It is a kind of evidence, but not
the OED kind.

I would further argue that by the very fact that a slang term is written
down sort of kills it as slang.  It becomes a different thing after being
recorded, it seems to me.  Slang is oral.  "Written-down slang" is nearly an
oxymoron.  Yes, I DO mean that "slang dictionary" is an oxymoron of sorts,
too.  But a "historical dictionary of slang" is a super-oxymoron.  I feel
that one cannot compare works such as the OED (and similar) to the HDAS.
They are quite different dictionaries, even if they employ a similar method.
The difference lies in the nature of the language being treated.  OED and
dicts of that ilk mean to deal with the written language, and rely almost
exclusively on written citations for evidence.  But to do a dictionary of
slang based on written citations seems to me an activity fraught with
frustration and some futility.

In saying this I do not mean to detract from the work of Lighter, Spears,
Chapman, Partridge, or any of a score of others who have, over the years,
done useful and important dictionaries of slang.  I simply want to make a
(largely philosophical) point that slang, being fundamentally oral, cannot
be effectively treated using a historical method.  Of course, some slang is
written, as that found on bathroom walls, or spray-painted onto urban
buildings and such; examples go back at least as far as ancient Pompeii.
But that is still of the folk, and unedited -- quite different from the sort
of quotations that OED typically uses.

That said, I hope the HDAS and other such dicts carry on, but I hope, too,
that they openly acknowledge the nature of the slang beast.  To me,
citations of slang terms are like insect specimens in an entomologist's
display case -- they show you something about individuals of a living
species, but they are dead, and even their morphology is not necessarily
typical, representative, or characteristic of what they are attempting to
show.

Frank Abate

-----Original Message-----
From: American Dialect Society [mailto:ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU]On Behalf
Of Fred Shapiro
Sent: Wednesday, June 04, 2003 11:23 AM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: Antedating of "Doofus"


Noodling around in the alt.usage.english archives, I found a significant
antedating of "doofus" posted to that newsgroup by Ben Zimmer.  The
Historical Dictionary of American Slang has 1966 as its first printed
citation, 1960 as its first "remembered from Jonathan Lighter's childhood"
citation.  But Zimmer found the following usage from searching ProQuest
Historical Newspapers; he speculates that by 1955 "doofus" might have been
a generic name for a dimwitted boxer, similar to "Joe Palooka":

1955 John Lardner in _N.Y. Times_ 25 Dec.
"Doofus lost every round from the third, but they give him the duke!"
"Gratz had him on the floor in the fifth!"
"You shoulda seen it!"
"What kind of officiating is that!"
"Was you there? You was? Then let me tell you what happened!"


Fred Shapiro


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Fred R. Shapiro                             Editor
Associate Librarian for Collections and     YALE DICTIONARY OF QUOTATIONS
  Access and Lecturer in Legal Research     Yale University Press,
Yale Law School                             forthcoming
e-mail: fred.shapiro at yale.edu               http://quotationdictionary.com
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