A Twitter comment on yesterday’s posting on dildos, the sex toys — entitled “Mitch is always DTF” (Mitch is a dildo) — reminded me that the word dildo has developed a use as a slur or term of abuse, and that — despite this blog’s long-standing attentions to dildos as sex toys, to slurs in general, and to the development of vocabulary in the sexual domain into terms of abuse — I hadn’t previously recorded this development here. So here comes a gang of fuckin’ stupid dildos.
From GDoS:
1 a general term of abuse: a fool, an incompetent [clear examples are 20th century; in American slang dictionaries in the 1960s, e.g. College Undergraduate Slang Study 1967-8 Dildo A person who always does the wrong thing; 1998 what a pair of fuckin dildos] …
Plus a few recent examples scraped up on the net:
I was making a joke, you stupid dildo (Twitter link)
Ethel Hubbard: You dumb dildo! (from Friday the 13th, Part V: A New Beginning)
(from the tv show F Is for Family)
From Wikipedia on the show:
F Is for Family is an American adult animated streaming television series created by Bill Burr and Michael Price for Netflix. … The show follows a dysfunctional suburban Irish-American family, and is set in the fictional town of Rustvale, Pennsylvania in the early-to-mid 1970s.
Deeper into dildonics. Whoa! The noun dildonics in the relevant sense (‘having to do with dildos (the sex toys)’) isn’t in the OED yet. But…
Paraphrasing the definitions somewhat, Urban Dictionary has the innovative dildonic ‘referring to or resembling a dildo (the sex toy)’ and ‘referring to or resembling a dildo (a fool)’ and dildonics ‘the study of or manufacture of dildos (the sex toys)’
(Other sources have (tele)dildonics ‘technology enabling people to engage in sexual activity remotely’. From OED3 (June 2018; latest version published online March 2019) has the noun dildonics < dildo (in the sex toy sense) + –onics (as in bionics, electronics, etc.): With singular agreement. The use of computers to mediate sexual interaction; (in later use sometimes) spec. = teledildonics … [1st cite 1974])
— The etymology of dildo. I once imagined, fancifully, that dildo was originally a Greek word — certainly the objects were in use in ancient Greece and Rome — borrowed into Latin as dildō (nom sg), in the third declension (with gen sg dildōnis), like dracō (nom sg) ‘dragon’, with gen sg dracōnis (note the Engl adj draconian).
Nice story, but it’s pure classicist fantasy, with no evidence for it at all. Instead, all the authoritative dictionaries in effect lament that the word appears around 1600 without any evident plausible source: a straightforward case of etymology unknown, or OOO (“of obscure origin”).
But wait. The entry in OED3 (June 2018; latest version published online December 2020) comes in two main subentries, A, the interjection dildo (a nonsense syllable in songs, similar to hey, diddle diddle); and B, the sex-toy noun dildo. The connection between the two initially struck me as tenuous, though the OED suggests a possible parallel in the use of the nonsense material nonny nonny / nony nony in songs as a euphemism for the vulva (marked as Obsolete. rare.), in
1611 J. Florio Queen Anna’s New World of Words Fossa… Vsed also for a womans pleasure-pit, nony-nony or pallace of pleasure.
The idea is that to avoid some taboo item you call on a bit of conventional nonsense, in this case from folksong — perhaps parallel to the recent use of hoo-ha as a euphemism for vulva or vagina.
According to the OED, A and B appear in the historical record at about the same time, around 1590. However, their relationship is unidirectional: a nonsensical bit from popular song gets pressed into service to refer to an edgy artifact, previously referred to simply by a vernacular word for penis (cock, pillicock, prick, pintle, etc.), which then became multifunctional, though with the ‘artificial penis’ use more shameful and therefore crying out for a substitute — but it would make no sense to take a taboo word and use it as filler nonsense in popular songs.
So the OED has then in fact suggested an etymology for sex-toy dildo — in nonsensical dildo. And, fa la la la la, nonsense material doesn’t have to, ooby dooby, have an etymology at all: it’s just sounds, some of them syllables in the language of the song.
— From sex toy to generalized abuse. Here there seem to be three stages, laid out in OED3:
B. 1. a. An object shaped like an erect penis, used for sexual stimulation. Also (less frequently): a (real) penis. [1st cites around 1600; 1598 J. Florio Worlde of Wordes Pinco, a prick, a pillicock, a pintle, a dildoe.] …
2. colloquial. Originally [cites from 17th cent.] as a general term of abuse for a boy or young man. In later use [20th cent.: Wentworth & Flexner 1960 Dict. Amer. Slang etc.]: a stupid, inept, or ridiculous person.
The development of a word for penis substitute to a general term of abuse would parallel the development of words for penis to general terms of abuse for males (dick, prick, maybe tool) and then (a development still in progress) to terms of abuse for people in general (She’s a stupid dildo, She’s a nasty dick) — perhaps facilitated by the idea that a dildo is a mere inanimate object used as an instrument (cf. tool).
April 3, 2021 at 9:06 pm |
If you’re going to expound on “dildo”, don’t forget the fine town of Dildo, Newfoundland, where they nominally speak English, even. There are apparently periodic proposals to change the name of the town; the locals don’t want to. What a bunch of …