saditty, hincty + dicty

[Benjamin Zimmer]

On Wed, 27 Jul 2005 00:57:39 -0400, Wilson Gray <wilson.gray at RCN.COM> wrote:

>OTOH, if you said that "dignti" > "digty"  because [-gnt-] is not a
>possible cluster in any dialect of English, you'd have made a claim
>that could not be simply dismissed out of hand as nonsense, because, to
>quote the late, great Al Capp, "as any fool can plainly see," that
>claim is true. And "digty" would > "dikty" almost automatically.

Or, alternatively, you could get to "digty" by first losing the [-n-] in
[dIgn at ti], which would finally explain the middle term of "hot diggety
dog"!

Seriously, though, I think Doug was on the right track when he wrote:

>As for the etymology, I doubt the exact progression presented above.
>However, note 'obsolete' Scots "ding" /dIN/ as a variant of "digne"
>/dInj(@)/, descended from French "digne".
>
>And look at the semantic match of US and Caribbean "dicty" with Scots
>(and northern English) "dink" [adj.] (origin "obscure" ... but perhaps
>related to "ding"??), still in use (I think), defined in SND as "(1)
>Neat, trim, finely dressed ... Applied only to women. / (2) Prim,
>precise; haughty."

The 'haughty' sense of English "digne" and its variants ("dingne", "dign",
Sc. "ding", etc.) goes all the way back to Chaucer (OED sense 4: "Having a
great opinion of one's own worth; proud, haughty, disdainful; esp. in phr.
_as digne as ditch-water_ [cf. 'stinking with pride'], _as digne as the
devil_"). And there's the related Scots form "dain" (OED: "Haughty;
reserved, distant; repellent" -- also obsolete).



--Ben Zimmer