Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Today’s Dilbert has Catbert giving advice on naming the company’s new dress code:

  (#1)

(in fact, a dorky name for it). Now on dork and dorky.

On this blog, look at “geek, dork, etc.” of 9/1/13, about a Shoebox cartoon, with links to earlier postings on the slang terms dweeb, nerd, geek, and dork, but focusing on the two items, nerd and geek, that have come to be used with neutral affect, even proudly (while dweeb and dork are contemptuous). From a character in the cartoon: “Nerds are more academically inclined, while we geeks are just super-passionate about our hobbies.”

Dork starts as vulgar slang for ‘penis’; the earliest cite in OED2 is for this sense, from a lexicographic discussion (so that this use is guaranteed to be earlier):

1964   Amer. Speech 39 118   The word dick itself serves as a model for two variants which are probably Midwestern, dirk and dork, also meaning ‘penis’.

Then comes the sense ‘a foolish or stupid person; also as a general term of contempt’, with a first cite from 1972 (Wikipedia has ‘a slang word for a stupid or inept person’). The sense development here is one that has occurred with several other slang terms for ‘penis’ — dick, prick, tool, putz; from ‘penis’ by metonymy to ‘person bearing a penis’, carrying over the vulgarity of the term.

This second sense of dork serves as the basis for suffixation with -y, to yield dorky, roughly ‘like a dork’, or as OED3 (Dec. 2005) has it:

slang (orig. U.S.). Contemptible or pathetic; spec. socially awkward, unfashionable.

with a 1970 cite from Current Slang (Univ. S. Dakota) 4 iv. 17: “Dorky, ridiculous, unfair”. Once again a lexicographic source, guaranteeing that the word is older than 1970.

The website “Lovely Little Lexemes: Exploring the strange and wonderful English language, one word at a time” by “Mrs. B” has a 3/3/12 entry on dorky, defining it as ‘stupid, inept, or unfashionable’; summarizing the OED‘s material on dork and dorky; and supplying this image from Sodahead.com:

  (#2)

This entry was posted on October 11, 2014 at 3:43 am and is filed under Derivation, Linguistics in the comics, Metonymy, Names, Slang. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.