Who me? Nah….
I realized recently while texting on my phone that my voice to text did not know the word “dadgumit” at all. Instead, my iPhone typed “dammit.” Not at all what I wanted to my very religious friend!
And I realized that I am, once again (I go through periods of time when I do and I don’t) am cursing more than the occasional “darn.” My bad and I am now more aware of it and so, will curtail (most) of my cursing, even low-level words like dadgumit and darn and crap.
As I considered what I had typed, I thought, “What a silly word. Dadgumit. Even my computer doesn’t know the word (add to dictionary). Where in the heck did it come from?”
I tried breaking it down into three words: dad, gum, and it. Who would have ever put those three innocent words together into a soft curse?
Dad—Who’s dad? Not my dad. He would never be caught spouting such a soft, innocuous, and meaningless word as “dadgumit.” Dad cursed and cursed big. Not all the time, but boy, he could string together some words that were rally powerful, hard consonant pounding words. When he was really mad, he ended his string of curses in Spanish. No, he wasn’t Spanish, but we live in Texas, so you tend to pick up a few things, you know? I miss my Dad’s cursing in a way. It was inventive, creative, hard-core and apparently anger-releasing.
The word ‘dad’ is probably prehistoric as the word is used in many languages since almost forever it seems. Some other words for ‘dad’ are dada, da, grandad, which started around 1793 and grandaddy from 1751, daddy from around the 1500s and by 1925 became a slang ‘daddy-o’ and very popular through the jazz age of the late 40s. And don’t forget ‘daddy-long-legs from 1814 Britain as “crane-fly” which somehow transmuted in the U.S. to name a spider. (I’ve played with a lot of grandaddy-long-legs as a child, especially in the dark of barns where they’d hide from the heat of a Texas summer.)
Gum—What kind of gum? Sweet gum? Gum tree? Gum ball? Spearmint? Super Bubble bubble gum?
Gum, as in the resin from dried plant sap, began around the 1300s. The Egyptians called it ‘kemai,’ a hard, sweet gelatine candy. In 1670, the gum tree got its name for its resin. Or we could be talking about the Old English ‘gomma’ for the mouth’s palate, from Old Norse ‘gomi.’ In early 14c. ‘gommen’ meant to treat with medicinal or aromatic gums, which transferred into a figurative sense of a sense of spoil or ruin, like a gummy substance, and then our first recording of ‘gummed up’ as in stuck machinery occurred around 1901. Quite a history of gum!
I think of gum as chewing gum. My fave as a kid was Super Bubble. I hadn’t tried bubble gum in decades and recently tried it. At 70, bubble gum just isn’t the same. Too much dental work. Gum sticks to crowns and such. Takes the fun right out of chewing gum. I was amazed to learn that bubble + gum didn’t arrive into our language until about 1935 and its known as a sign of the 1960’s culture. Well, I am a child of the 60s, so there ya go.
It–One of the tiny words in the English language and sometimes very important. I, myself, abhor ‘it’ as a writer. It’s too easy to sling on the page in place of something much more interesting. It’s often used as a lazy word, a pronoun in which better, more descriptive words hide behind. And when editing, I always search for the dreaded passivity “it was.” (shudder).
It didn’t always refer to a thing like it does today. Back before Middle English, ‘it’ referred to a male, but faded away from the gender pronoun as a nominative and accusative of a third person singular pronoun. In Old English, ‘it’ was ‘hit’ but the ‘h’ wasn’t pronounced so it got dropped over time. The ‘h’ in ‘him’ and ‘her’ is more of a replacement.
It has a lot of meanings, if not as a pronoun directly referring to the previous noun, it refers to a thing of some sort. Rudyard Kipling, in 1904, used ‘it’ referring to the sex act. From 1842, the game of tag uses it as in “tag you’re it!”
So, while ‘it’ is tiny in it’s two-letter composition, the meanings can be monumental and varied. Which is why, when I comment on someone’s manuscript, I often do a search and fund and highlight the word ‘it’ throughout. You’d be amazed how often it’s used and used poorly. It has it’s uses, and the poor word must be exhausted from overuse and abuse. Give it a rest.
From three innocuous words, stuck together with used under-the-school-desk bubble gum no doubt, came a rather soft curse word, usually I think heard in the South, or in rural areas of the U.S. Dadgumit is considered a minced oath, a softer version of God damn it, not necessarily a one-to-one correlation—Dad for God, gum for damn, and it for it, well that last one fits. Some dictionaries, I just discovered, spell it ‘dad-gummit.’
Some have the term originating from the phrase ‘dog gone’ used in the early 18th century to express frustration. Apparently the reference to ‘dog’ was quite offensive at the time, as in ‘you cowardly dog you!, It is theorized, because who doesn’t love a good, unimportant to the world as a whole, theory, that the word ‘dad’ was substituted to break up the phrase when used as an accent or comedic relief. (What accent would prefer dad? Not sure about that one.)
So, dadgummit, I’ve taught my iPhone and computer, (whinedos, I mean Windows, by the way) how to spell the word correctly. Hopefully in future texting, I won’t be seriously cursing my good friends, but using a term expressing mild frustration instead. Not at them, of course, never at them! Rather, life in general. You know, that thing that interrupts us having fun.
