Go Do Do in Louisiana

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Heather Lopez from Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Hey, Heather, what’s going on?

What’s up?

So I was calling to ask about a saying, dodo.

So I am from Colorado and I grew up in New Mexico.

And my husband and his family, they’re from Louisiana.

Whenever I tell my little ones to go, we say, let’s go night-night.

My mother-in-law says, let’s go dodo.

So I was wondering where the saying, let’s go dodo, comes from.

So is that a little bit of a culture shock for you to go from Colorado to Louisiana and get all that new language?

Yes, yes.

It has definitely been very interesting.

My husband’s had to kind of coach me on last names because it’s very French.

And so I’ve had to learn a lot of new names and sayings here.

Cool.

Dodo is a really great one because it’s got a long history in French and a long history where it meets English.

Do you know any French at all?

No, I don’t.

I do not.

Okay, that’s fine.

But a lot of the people who studied French who are listening to the show now are going, oh, yes, I know what he’s going to say.

I’m going to talk about the French verb for to sleep.

It’s dormir, D-O-R-M-I-R, very similar to the Spanish verb for to sleep.

And English dormitory, the place where you sleep.

There we go.

So dodo comes from dormir, and it basically is a baby talk.

It’s very exactly like night-night or other reduplicated baby talk words that we have in English,

Like choo-choo or wee-wee or poo-poo, those sorts of things.

And it goes back to the 15th century in French.

And so what you’re hearing is this remnant of Acadian French in Louisiana showing up in English.

That and some other expressions in Louisiana are so entrenched that it will probably last 100 or 200 more years.

It’s just it’s absolutely a part of the culture down there and part of the language.

Absolutely. And then they say fait d’eau d’eau.

Yeah. And so it’s like a dance.

So whenever the parents are out all night participating in activity, then they say that there’s a room for the babies to go in.

So that’s the way the parents can go long into the night without having to leave and the children can go to sleep in the room.

So that’s from the French word to do or to make.

Faire dodo, faire dormir, means to go to sleep.

Oh, okay. Awesome.

So anyway, it’s really cool.

And I have something for you, a recommended book, which will help you get ahead of this and kind of get ahead of it.

Oh, yes, I would love that.

It’s a wonderful book.

It’s the Dictionary of Louisiana French, published by the University Press of Mississippi.

It’s not amateurish.

It’s very professionally done, and it totally covers a lot of the stuff that you’re going to encounter in your new life in Louisiana.

Oh, that’s fantastic.

I would love to read that.

Yeah, check it out.

Perfect.

Well, thank you, guys.

Thank you, Heather.

Thanks for calling.

Okay, bye-bye.

In French, there’s also, this is more common in France where the metro is more of a thing, but they have the saying,

Which is kind of like expresses the humdrumness of ordinary life.

You’re right in the metro.

You go to your job.

You go to sleep.

Repeat.

Metro, bulo, todo.

Is that how they translated the title of Groundhog Day, the movie?

Oh, they may have.

That should be a great example of it, yeah.

877-929-9673.