The Origiins of Skedaddle

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name is Brittany. I’m from Houston, Texas.

Welcome to the show, Brittany. How can we help you?

I have actually a quick question about the word skedaddle.

Skedaddle.

Yes. I have convinced myself that it is an entire sentence kind of squished down into one word, and the best way to kind of describe it is by using an accent.

So I think that it sounds like, let’s get out of here.

So, like, let’s get out of here.

Like, let’s skedaddle.

Oh, interesting.

I have never heard that theory.

I have never heard that theory either.

So you came up with this theory on your own?

Yes, all by myself.

And I’m sure that it is probably wrong.

Yeah, probably.

But it’s beautiful.

I’ve never heard that one before.

Never heard it before.

It’s got some thinking behind it.

Get out of here.

It’s not.

Oh, thank you for being nice.

It’s not the origin of it.

But, you know, you join a huge list of people who think that they’ve come up with the origins of skedaddle, and they are mostly origin unknown.

And we’ve had good, reliable etymologists try to trace it to Greek, and that’s not right.

We’ve had people claim that it comes from a variety of languages around the world, including Native American languages and Yiddish, and that’s not right.

The best theory that we have, the one that is almost certainly correct, is that it comes from a Scots dialect word, meaning to spill or to spill in a clumsy way.

And there’s one really descriptive citation in the dictionary of the Scots language that says something along the lines of spilling milk on the way to market and then kind of trampling it as you go.

It’s like it’s being careless, kind of rushing so much that you’re just making mistakes and stuff.

But even then, that’s kind of iffy because the meanings don’t really match up.

But the word is skeindaddle or skedaddle.

And there’s a variety in other parts of the dialect regions of the UK.

There was a skittle is a very similarly defined word.

Wow.

Yeah, right?

I was not expecting it to be Scottish.

That’s pretty awesome.

Skendaddle.

What probably happened is the word came over to the United States with the Scots and the Scots-Irish.

And then during the American Civil War, for some reason, skedaddle became hugely popular.

It shows up in letters and newspapers, and it was re-exported back to the British Isles, where it was reintroduced with this new meaning to run away in a hurried fashion.

Alongside the older meaning, which had stayed there all along.

And there’s probably a lot of that during the Civil War.

Yeah, that’s amazing.

Yeah, there was an incredible amount of interplay between the British Isles and the American states during the American Civil War.

We forget that all this materiel that was coming back and forth and ships and commerce that was kind of rerouted because of the war, a lot of it ended up in the British Isles.

So naturally, the Americans and their language went over there.

Well, thank you so much for sharing that.

Yeah, sure. Thanks for your call.

Really appreciate it, Brittany.

Absolutely.

You guys have a good one.

All right.

Take care.

Bye.

Bye-bye.

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