If someone calls you dibby, should you be flattered or insulted? You’d know if you were in college a century ago—it’s outdated college slang! This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Dibby”
You’re listening to A Way with Words. I’m Martha Barnette.
And I’m Grant Barrett.
You know, Martha, I was flipping through some old issues of dialect notes. It was started more than 100 years ago. It’s long since ceased publication. But while it lasted, it collected word lists and glossaries and language from around the country. People would report from all quarters and all corners of the things that people said and the words they used.
In there are collections of college slang and high school slang. And what’s really interesting about this stuff is how much of it lasts. But even more interesting is how much of it doesn’t last. A lot of this language simply doesn’t endure. And if I gave you some of these words, you wouldn’t know what I was talking about.
Oh, yeah? Try me.
All right. If I called somebody a dub, what am I saying about them? D-U-B, dub.
A dub? It doesn’t sound very positive, whatever it is.
A screw up? Somebody’s a clutch?
Yeah, a foolish person.
Yeah, it’s pretty good.
Yeah.
It does sound like it should mean somebody who doesn’t have their act together, right?
Yeah.
That word was collected in New Mexico and California, again, about 100 years ago. Here’s another one. If I said that somebody was dibby, what would I be saying about them? Or if I said that the weather was dibby, what would I be saying about them? D-I-B-B-Y.
Dibby.
Dibby.
I have no idea. When I think of dibby, I think of a little baby or something with little fat rolls.
It simply means fine. And I’ve kind of chosen these two words because one’s negative and one’s positive. And this is one of the places where slang is most productive, coming up with words to indicate that something’s bad or indicate that something’s good.
But you and I don’t know, dibby, and we might have used it if we were Brooklyn schoolgirls 100 years ago, which that’s where it was collected. But it’s gone. Like a lot of the slang, it just went poof and disappeared.
Some of this stuff stays, though. 100 years ago, you could still call a woman a babe and say, oh boy, isn’t she a babe, meaning that she’s very attractive. A hundred years ago.
A hundred years ago.
Who knew it was that old, right? Anyway, I had a good time reading this stuff, and I thought you would appreciate it.
I love it.
It was dibby. Did I use that correctly?
Very dibby.
Yes.
You’re no dub.
Thank you.
Well, if you’d like to talk about slang or grammar or pronunciation or old sayings or new coinages, regional dialects, you name it, give us a call. The number’s 1-877-929-9673. Or send us an email to words@waywordradio.org.
