SKEDADDLE ETYMOLOGY MOVIE

Without ever knowing, or bothering to check the etymology – which I see now is particularly vague – I had always thought this was derived from a hurried pronunciation of (let) 's get out of (here). 'Can you give me the pencil?'), so on and so forth. Witness the pronunciations of words like 'language' (is it related to the how 'women' became 'wi-men'?), the pronunciation of 'accurate' (sometimes), 'vinegar' (because of umlaut-ish vowel harmony, perhaps?), and 'pencil' (when it's near the end of a question, e.g. It seems to me that /ɪ/ is sometime's English's 'second schwa'. (See also the recent ADS-L discussion on squadoosh, which grew out of Jonathan Lighter's post on skadoosh, which he spelled as skidoosh.) Could Black have drawn on it for his ad lib?īob: I mention squadoosh in the Globe column - it could've been an indirect influence, but according to Mark Osborne, Jack Black said he came up with the word by fusing skidoo with douche. I haven't seen the movie, so I don't know the context, but I have been aware for a while of a word usually spelled 'squadoosh,' with the first syllable pronounced just like the word 'squad.' From the usage, I quickly concluded that it's a synonym of 'zilch,' i.e., 'nothing.' It has an entry in the urban dictionary, which adds some info on the likely source and an alternative meaning. Of course, we'll see what spelling(s) win :P In my dialect, it seems that /ɛ/ and /i/ will often be reduced to rather than, making the a-spelling preferable to me to preserve the. On another note with dialects - rhotics vs non-rhotics aren't the only one's to deal with.

Filed by Ben Zimmer under Orthography, Phonetics and phonology.

SKEDADDLE ETYMOLOGY MOVIE

But the movie just premiered in London a few days ago, so we can probably expect that spelling to spread over the summer as more non-rhotic speakers pick up the word. So far I only see one Googlehit for the pronunciation spelling skerdoosh for the 'Kung Fu Panda' word. But perhaps like examples given in my post last year, the in words like kerplunk originally had a non-rhotic pronunciation of but then got reanalyzed rhotically by / r/-ful speakers. Many of the ker- words date to nineteenth-century American usage, when it would have been quite likely for to represent schwa, since more Americans were non-rhotic back then, especially in the Northeast. These initial elements can attach to -chunk, -flop, -plunk, -slam, -slap, -slash, -souse, -swash, -swosh, -thump, -whop, and more. More examples along these lines can be found in the OED entry for ker-, defined as 'the first element in numerous onomatopoeic or echoic formations intended to imitate the sound or the effect of the fall of some heavy body.' Spelling variants include ke-, ca-, ka-, che-, and co. The OED draft entry for kaboom gives this example from Bill Bryson's Notes from a Small Island (1995): 'Brightly pulsating machines, some of them playing electronic tunes or making unbidden kerboom noises.' Bryson was born in Iowa but has spent most of his adult life in England, and his book was originally published by Doubleday in Great Britain, so I would guess the spelling of kerboom is either his own Briticization or his editor's. (For more on this point, see Heidi Harley's recent post on phrasebook pronunciation and my post from last year, ' Pinker's almer mater.') For instance, a British speaker could represent the onomatopoetic kaboom as kerboom. To these we could add two-letter sequences with, particularly and, which can be used by non-rhotic speakers to represent the same unstressed vowel.

The Wikipedia article on ' schwa' gives examples for all six letters typically used in English to render vowel sounds: Then again, skidoo is probably derived from skedaddle (by way of the variant scadoodle), so why not skedoosh?Īll of these are potential spellings of, since the unstressed mid-central vowel, a.k.a the 'schwa' sound, is notoriously fickle in its orthographic representation.

But skidoosh might make more historical sense, since Jack Black was inspired by the old slang expression (23) skidoo. I went with skadoosh since that's the way it appeared on a T-shirt designed by a crew member (as I learned from my high school friend Mark Osborne, who, as luck would have it, co-directed the movie). There's no fixed spelling for the word (at least not yet), since it started off as an unscripted ad-lib from Jack Black, the voice of Po the Panda. In today's Boston Globe it's my honor to pinch-hit for a vacationing Jan Freeman, who writes a fantastic weekly column called ' The Word.' I took the opportunity to write about a word popularized by the new movie 'Kung Fu Panda': skadoosh.