[Ads-l] "oops" history

[Ben Zimmer]

My Wall Street Journal column this week is about the history of the
interjection "oops." (Apologies for the paywall.)

https://www.wsj.com/articles/oops-explanations-get-slippery-for-what-we-say-when-we-stumble-11564160428

The impetus for the column is an article by Raymond Malewitz in the Summer
2019 issue of Critical Inquiry, which conjectures that "oops" grew out of a
gradual shortening of "ooperzootic," a slang term for a fit of craziness
that plays off of "epizootic," referring to a flu outbreak among horses in
the late 19th century.

https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/703961
https://today.oregonstate.edu/news/origin-word-‘oops’

The evidence supporting this theory is rather thin (lacking much in the way
of intermediary forms like "ooper"). Then again, the prevailing explanation
for the origin of "oops," that it's a shortening of "upsidaisy" (in turn
from "up-a-daisy"), doesn't have a whole lot of evidence to back it up
either.

The current earliest cite in OED3 for "oops" comes from a 1921 horse-racing
column in the Washington Post, which uses "oops, muh dear" in a discussion
of a horse named My Dear:

1921   Washington Post 1 Nov. 21/4   Oops, muh dear, it's in the last where
the dirty work takes place.

Malewitz takes this as evidence of an equine connection, but I don't think
the columnist had "ooperzootic"/"epizootic" in mind -- rather, this is an
allusion to the 1910 song, "Whoops, My Dear."

https://repository.asu.edu/items/29584
http://digitalcollections.baylor.edu/cdm/ref/collection/fa-spnc/id/135052

The first verse goes:

"Georgie was a dainty youth, well known for miles around.
Up on the street both night and day, he always could be found.
With his natty little cane and flaming crimson tie
When he'd come strolling down the lane, you'd loudly hear him cry, 'Whoops,
my dear.'"

This was a popular song, and "whoops, my dear" (and variants) took on
various slang connotations, typically related to dandyism or homosexuality.
It seems that Collyer, inspired by the horse's name My Dear, was playfully
taking on the voice of a dandy as in the song. See this blog post for more
on the phrase:

http://everydayheterosexism.blogspot.com/2017/04/whoops-my-dear-evolution-of-homophobic.html

The catchphrase was rendered as "oops, my dear" as early as 1911, e.g.:

https://www.newspapers.com/clip/34189343/oops_my_dear/
https://www.newspapers.com/clip/34189358/oops_my_dear/
https://www.newspapers.com/clip/34189314/oops_my_dear/

That "oops" as a variant of "whoops" may have contributed to the eventual
popularity of the interjection.

Before OED3 revised the "oops" entry to include the 1921 example, the
earliest cite given was from a 1922 comic strip by Rudolph Dirks, "The
Captain and the Kids" (a spinoff of "The Katzenjammer Kids"). Peter Reitan
and I plumbed the databases for earlier examples of "oops" (and variants
thereof) and found various antedatings that clearly indicate its use as an
interjection used when suffering a minor accident. In strips by Dirks,
those accidents typically happened to adults suffering from the mischief of
brothers Hans and Fritz. Here are early examples:

"oop": Aug. 9, 1914
("Hot Biscuits," Boston Globe, Color and Comic Section, p. 1)
https://www.newspapers.com/clip/34154408/oop/

"whoops": Aug. 16, 1914
("Doughnuts for Two," Shreveport Times, Comic Weekly, p. 1)
https://www.newspapers.com/clip/34186809/whoops/

"oops":  Sep. 16, 1917
("Hans und Fritz -- Boom! Der Sunsetter," Dayton Sunday News, Comic Weekly,
p. 1)
https://www.newspapers.com/clip/34153999/oops/

As I say in the WSJ column, the appearance of "oops" (etc.) in these comic
strips suggests a possible connection to similar interjections in German,
since Dirks's characters typically speak in German-inflected English. In
German, equivalents to "oops" include "hoppala," "hopperla," "hoppla,"
"hoppsa," and "hopsala." Deutsches Wörterbuch has a relevant entry for
"hoppas," which can be said when a child falls:

http://woerterbuchnetz.de/cgi-bin/WBNetz/wbgui_py?sigle=DWB&mode=Vernetzung&lemid=GH12349
HOPPAS ,
1) interj. ein springen oder auch stolpern bezeichnend: entweder sagt (beim
fallen eines kindes)
trocken, fest, ruhig: es thut nichts; oder sagt noch viel besser ein
lustiges altes dakapo-wort, z. b. hoppas! J. Paul Levana 1, 130.

The cite there is for Jean Paul's "Levana" published in 1807, so it's about
as old as "up-a-daisy" in English. It's hard to know if there was any
German influence on the English forms, since the first syllable in
"up-a-daisy"/"upsidaisy" just seems to come from the preposition "up,"
suggestive of throwing a child in the air. Maybe the German equivalent
helped to reinforce the connection to (accidental) falling, as in the Dirks
comic-strip usage. But I'm just conjecturing here.

--bgz

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