"saditty" (snobbish) from "Saturday"?

[Douglas G. Wilson]

Wilson Gray wrote:
> ... It's not at all
> impossible that someone, as a joke, decided to use the pronunciation,
> [s@ deTI] or some such, for "sedate" and it took off from there.
>> Let's not forget that Bonnie Taylor-Blake found a citation for
>> "seditty" from 1948 relating the word to "sedate":
>>
>> http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0806c&L=ads-l&P=617
>>
>> Whether this is any more plausible than the "Saturday" derivation, I cannot say.
-

I agree it's a real possibility. In fact a reasonable default
hypothesis. [I think it's more plausible than the "Saturday" derivation
(but that don't make it true).] I think various humorous malformations
of slightly-sophisticated words were fashionable a few decades ago.
Probably some of the savants know more than I. My father had dozens of
these (most of which I can't remember offhand): one example which comes
to mind is "coinkydink" for "coincidence", which gets thousands of
Google hits.

-- Doug Wilson

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