![]() (We’ve expanded on the Oxford citation to add context.) “Here they wait untill We grow very angry, about them, for Canteens, Camp Kettles, Blanketts, Tents, Shoes, Hose, Arms, Flints, and other Dittoes, while We are under a very critical Solicitude for our Army at New York, on Account of the Insufficiency of Men.” 12, 1776, letter from John Adams to his wife, Abigail, during the Revolutionary War, “ditto” is used as a noun meaning “a duplicate or copy an exact resemblance a similar thing,” according to the OED: The citation, from a biography of Edmund Burke by James Pryor, describes a Parliamentary candidate as using “the language of the counting-house” in support of remarks by Burke: “I say ditto to Mr. In a 1775 example in the OED, the verbal phrase “to say ditto to” is used in the sense of “to acquiesce in or express agreement with what has been said by (another).” In the 1770s, the usage expanded further, with several other senses of “ditto” showing up. (The OED notes that a 1696 edition of the dictionary changes “same place” to “the same Commodity or Place,” and that a 1706 edition adds “the aforesaid or the same” to the meaning of ditto in Italian.) “ Ditto (Italian, said) a word used much in Merchants Accompts, and relation of Foreign news and signifieth the same place with that immediately beforementioned.” Oxford’s first example of this expanded use of “ditto” is from The New World of Words (4th ed.), a 1678 dictionary by Edward Phillips: This monthly use of “ditto” soon expanded in English to include other senses of “aforesaid” and “the same,” the OED says, such as in accounts and lists “in commercial, office, and colloquial language.” Here’s the citation, from a 1625 collection of travel writing by the English cleric Samuel Purchas: “The eight and twentieth ditto, I went … to the Generals Tent.” In the dictionary’s earliest English example of the usage, “ditto” appears in the date sense and means “in or of the month already named said month.” And the phrase il detto libro would have meant “the said book.” In an Italian sentence, the OED explains, “December 22” and “December 26” might have been written as 22 di dicembre and 26 detto. We wrote briefly in 2007 about the history of the word “ditto,” but your question gives us a chance to expand on our original post.Įnglish borrowed the word “ditto” in the early 1600s from Italian, where detto ( ditto in the Tuscan dialect) was the past participle of dire (to say).Īt the time, the Oxford English Dictionary says, detto was used adjectivally in the sense of “aforesaid” to modify dates in Italian “to avoid repetition of the name of a month.” And Xerox wasn’t even responsible for the use of “ditto” in the copy-machine sense. It performs an act of saying by merely pointing back to already said words.Q: In The Pioneers, a book from Time-Life’s The Old West series, a pioneer woman uses “ditto” to mean something like “I agree with what you just said.” I thought the term had its origins in the Xerox copy machine, which created “dittos” of documents.Ī: No, the word “ditto” had been around for hundreds of years before Xerox made its first copying machine in the mid-20th century. What she means is not just “I agree,” but “I hereby say the same.” Ditto still carries the concept of actual saying with it. If the Patrick Swayze character in Ghost said “I love you” and Demi Moore said “Agreed” or “I concur,” it would sound like she was agreeing only with the proposition he expressed: that he loved her. The force of ditto goes beyond mere agreement though. Instead of repeating something like January 29 or Newcastle upon Tyne in a list, one could just put ditto in after the first occurrence.ĭitto gradually drifted from a noun meaning “the aforesaid” or “the same” (as in a 1759 cookbook: “Parsley roots, and leaves of ditto”) to an adverb meaning “I agree with what you just said.” It comes from Italian ditto, a dialect variation on detto, meaning “said," the past participle of dice, “to say.” It was used in Italian as in il ditto libro, “the aforesaid book.” In English, it came to be used in the 17th century to avoid having to repeat words and phrases in accounting and commercial language. But the “what you said” use is centuries older than the machine. The reading is that a ditto machine makes copies, so saying ditto creates a “copy” of something that was just said. “Ditto” as a response meant as “same here” or “what you said” has a modern, almost slangy feel to it, so many people assume that it was taken from the copy machine use. It’s a crucial line in the 1990 movie Ghost, a favorite phrase of Rush Limbaugh’s dittoheads, and the reigning copy machine of the mid-20th century, but what does ditto really mean, and where did it come from?
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |