![]() The police, so the legend goes, would tell the men to skedaddle by saying "Twenty-three skidoo!" While all that may be true, local word origin expert Barry Popik has uncovered that the phrase was used in Chicago several years before the Flatiron Building was completed. The breeze would lift the lady's skirts revealing some ankle. He calls it instead an 'enlargement of dial. The story, as it goes, is that young men would hang out at that breezy corner waiting for young ladies to pass. skedaddle (v.)'to run away,' 1861, American Civil War military slang, of unknown origin, perhaps connected to earlier use in northern England dialect with a meaning 'to spill.' Liberman says it 'has no connection with any word of Greek, Irish, or Swedish, and it is not a blend' contra De Vere. There's a legend that the old expression "23 Skidoo" originated near the Flatiron Building at 23rd St and Broadway/Fifth Avenue. We may see some clouds from Tropical Storm Nicole as it moves northward toward Nova Scotia, and later in the week we may get some rain as what remains of Tropical Depression Matthew, which dumped craploads of rain on Louisiana, gets caught up in a trough of low pressure as the trough moves through our area on Thursday. ![]() While Gothamist thinks breezy is a fun word to say aloud, its use indicates that not much is happening weatherwise. For now, I'm skedaddling out of here.It should be breezy today and tomorrow. Shisler's Dictionary of English Phonesthemes. Who uses skedaddle According to an 800 page historical book authored in 1866 about the US Civil War, the word skedaddle was invented by a newspaper in 1862. But if you're interested in further investigations into these semantic affinities, check out Benjamin K. SKIDADDLE, often spelled skedaddle, is a word that has been bothering Jack Morrison of Sandymount, late of New York, as the country hairdressers used to say in their advertisements. but far more than this was then signified by its etymology, Skedaddle. The problem with research into phonesthemes is that this kind of "clustering" is very often in the eye of the beholder. and need never be misunderstood, Imbedded in the origin of a single word. With the help of Visual Thesaurus wordmaps, it's easy to come up other possible word clusters with /sk-/ or /skr-/ like scuff, skin, scrape, and scratch (surface abrasion) or scum, scurf, and scrap (cast-off stuff). And just because there's a particular cluster like the scurrying /sk-/ verbs doesn't mean that the same sounds can't form another loose semantic group. Among scholars of the phenomenon, the jury is still out on how much "psychological reality" these word-bits really have. ![]() Linguists refer to these bits of words that seem to cluster around certain meanings as phonesthemes. It's almost as if there's a hidden force guiding words from different origins to converge on /sk-/ as the sound of skittishness, with skadoosh being the latest example. Various Greek, Celtic, and Nordic etymologies have been proposed over the years, but with little to no evidence to support them. Those roots, however, are not quite certain. For instance, scamper probably comes from Latin excampare "to decamp," while scurry is short for hurry-scurry, a reduplicated form of hurry. The word rose to prominence in American slang during the US Civil War, but it probably has roots in English dialectal speech. Why do we have this cluster of /sk-/ verbs in English? They don't all come from the same etymological source. I put together a word list with 15 of them, including scamper, scatter, scramble, scurry, scuttle, and skitter. These words all start with the /sk-/ sound, and if you think about it, a lot of fast-moving verbs start with /sk-/ or /skr-/. In the column, I mention that the development of skedaddle, scadoodle, and skidoo could have been influenced by some regional Americanisms of Scottish origin, verbs describing hurried motion like scoot, scooch, and skoosh. And skidoo probably came from scadoodle, which in turn is a variant of skedaddle. When its time to go, we might skedaddle after we say, OK then, bye now, if we want a kiss or a hug we may ask someone to gimme some suga or lemme hug. The English Dialect Dictionary, a late 19th century publication, says that skedaddle stems from a Scottish. It came from the fertile mind of Jack Black, voice of Po the Panda, who was inspired by an equally silly old slang expression, 23 skidoo. The exact origin of the word remains a puzzle though. In Sunday's Boston Globe I fill in for Jan Freeman, who writes a regular language column called "The Word." My topic is a silly new word that appears in the movie "Kung Fu Panda": skadoosh.
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