Dodo the Baby

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Trinette Wiggins calling from Virginia Beach, Virginia.

So my daughter recently had a baby and I was putting him to sleep and I started to say dodo the baby and it occurred to me I hadn’t heard it since she was a baby when I used to sing it to her and I kind of heard it because I grew up in southern Louisiana. So it was a thing we said, but I just never heard it anywhere else.

So I was wondering where did dodo come from? It seems to relate to putting babies to sleep with dodo, so dodo the baby or let’s go dodo.

Yeah, that’s familiar to me.

Did you sing a nursery rhyme?

No, it wasn’t a nursery rhyme. It would just be like, we’d tell the baby, let’s go do-do, or while you’re rocking him, I would just sing like do-do the baby. So it wasn’t anything like a song. It was just something we said that meant it was time to go to sleep.

Yeah.

Are you from that part of the United States, from down in the French-speaking part of New Orleans or Baton Rouge down that way?

Yes. So I’m from a small town in Ascension Parish, and it’s like halfway between New Orleans and Baton Rouge.

That makes a lot of sense because that comes from the French, and it’s a classic nursery word or child’s word to mean to sleep, and it’s used throughout the French-speaking world. You’ll find it in Quebec. You’ll find it in the French and French Creole spoken in the Caribbean. You’ll find it even in Mauritian Creole on Mauritius, and it’s even popped up in migrations into South African English and Afrikaans from people who have settled there from various French-speaking parts of the world.

Yeah, so it’s widely used. And it’s kind of a corruption of possibly two words, both which mean to nod or to dandel, like to dandel a child on your knee. And both kind of influenced by dormir, which means to sleep. A little bit of reduplication, which means doubling of a sound or a syllable. So do-deligne and dedine are the two verbs. So sometimes it’s do-do, d-o-d-u, but usually it’s d-o-d-o, do-do.

And I asked about the nursery rhyme, and I don’t know this nursery rhyme well. I wasn’t raised in a French-speaking household, but there is one, and it’s just basically, you know, sleep, baby sleep. The baby will soon go to sleep. There’s a white chicken in the barn who will make a little crow for the child who will soon go dodo.

Oh, wow. I’ve never heard that before. You can find that if you look it up on YouTube if you want to learn it to sing to your grandchild. Just look up the phrase dodo, l’enfant, do. And long fauna is L-apostrophe-E-N-F-A-N-T space D-O.

Okay, I sure will do that. Trinette, I love the image of you holding this baby and rocking the baby to sleep and then having this sort of linguistic heirloom pop up, you know, that you remember from your own childhood, and all of a sudden there it is with this baby in your arms.

Yeah, I even asked my daughter, I said, do you remember me saying that or singing? And she’s like, not really, but I’ve heard it before. She was born in Louisiana, but she’s mostly been raised in Virginia.

-huh. That’s lovely.

Yeah, those little bits just stick around in the last generations, don’t they?

Yeah.

Thank you. I’m definitely going to look up that nursery rhyme.

Yeah, give the little take a smooch and a squeeze for us, will you?

I sure will.

Okay. Take care now.

Thank you so much for calling.

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