Dips, dipshits, dipsticks, dipwads, diphthongs

[Jonathan Lighter]

None of the Language Log commenters note that "You dipthong" works
partly because heh heh heh heh heh heh heh heh heh heh you said
"thong."

Otherwise, new to me, though even today I'm as likely as not to
pronounce the linguistic term as "dip-".

Without bothering to check HDAS, which is clear across the room right
now, I believe that "dipstick" antedates _Mork & Mindy_.

I recall that I first heard "You dip!" on Earth Day, 1970, in midtown
Manhattan. God knows why I recall that, but I do. It wasn't addressed
to me, however.



JL

On Fri, Dec 9, 2011 at 12:30 AM, Geoffrey Nunberg
<nunberg at ischool.berkeley.edu> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Geoffrey Nunberg <nunberg at ISCHOOL.BERKELEY.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: Dips, dipshits, dipsticks, dipwads, diphthongs
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> I couldn't get into the site to read the piece (I have a password somewhere), so you may have touched on this, but "You're all dipsticks" was the denatured phrase used in place of "You're all assholes" in the 1979 Mork and Mindy sendup of est in which David Letterman played the mercenary founder of Ellsworth Revitalization Konditioning, or erk. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mork_Goes_Erk)
>
> Geoff
>
>> From: Neal Whitman <nwhitman at AMERITECH.NET>
>> Date: December 8, 2011 7:31:57 AM PST
>> Subject: Dips, dipshits, dipsticks, dipwads, diphthongs
>>
>>
>> An overview of "dip"-based pejoratives, inspired by finding out that some
>> people use "dip(h)thong" as an insult (subscription required):
>> http://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/dictionary/3058/
>>
>> This 2009 Language Log post by Chris Potts had some useful reader comments:
>> http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=978
>>
>> Neal Whitman
>
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