doodly-squat

[Laurence Horn]

At 2:30 PM -0400 7/11/05, Wilson Gray wrote:
>
>Slight;y OT: I saw an ad in which "diddley" is used as a synonym of
>"nothing." FWIW, I've always known this word as "doodley," shortened
>from "doodley-squat." Way back in the day, there was a song that had
>the following call-and-response:
>
>C: My gal is red-hot!
>R: Yo' gal ain't doodley-squat!
>
>This song was in origin R&B, but the version that's usually played on
>oldies shows is the rock-a-billy cover. Uh, since I'm not trying to go
>anywhere with this, I'll just stop.
>
>-Wilson Gray

In a 2001 paper* I wrote (partly) on the grammar of "squat" a few
years back, I use the above exchange as an epigraph:

My gal is red hot.
Your gal ain't doodly-squat.
-Refrain from "(My Gal is) Red Hot,"  rockabilly classic by Billy Lee Riley

I don't seem to have included a date for the composition, but I can't
remember if it's because I tried to come up with one but couldn't be
sure, or simply because I plumb forgot.  I also include this early
cite, apparently the first "doodly-squat" found in print:

She ain't never had nothin'-not eben doodly-squat, and when she gits
uh chance tuh git holt uh sumpin de ole buzzard is gone on uh rampage.
                 (Zora Neale Hurston (1934), Jonah's Gourd Vine,
cited in OED entry)

--to which I append a footnote:
Note the presence of the not eben in licensing position, in the light
of Pott's recognition (1833: 410) that minimizers are understood as
evoking an explicit or implicit nicht einmal das  'not even...' and
of subsequent work by Fauconnier (1975) and others on the scalar
nature of such NPIs.

These are both what I call "licensed squatitives" (corresponding to
standard Eng. _anything_, or Neg. Concord _nothing_), but I also
spent a lot of time on "unlicensed" ones (corresponding to standrd
Eng. _nothing_, e.g.:

Unlicensed:
When the more sophisticated students complain that they are learning
squat, I would direct the professor to remind them that tutoring
builds the self-esteem of both tutor and tutee.
(Wisconsin State Journal, 24 Oct. 1996)

Licensed:
He went to Stanford on the GI Bill.  He then looked into a career as
a newspaper reporter but discovered writing didn't pay squat.
           ("Tough Guy Jack Palance, an Artist at Heart", The
Tennessean, 18 Oct. 1996)

Larry

*Flaubert polarity, squatitive negation, and other quirks of grammar,
Perspectives on Negation and Polarity Items,  J. Hoeksema, H.
Rullmann, V. Sánchez-Valencia & T. van der Wouden (eds.), 173-200.
Amsterdam:  John Benjamins, 2001.