Does Toodle-Loo Come From French “à Tout à l’Heure”?

Hi there, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, thank you for taking my call.

This is Pam from New York City.

Welcome, Pam.

What can we do for you?

I would like to know about the derivation of the word toodaloo.

If you can help me with that.

I’m a woman of a certain age, and when my mother was a woman of a certain age, she was quite flamboyant.

And every once in a while, she would say, okay, toodaloo.

And I understood it to mean, see you later.

And then I started studying French.

And I learned an idiom.

It was a tout à l’heure.

And I think it meant literally to all the hour or to the next, not the next hour.

I’m not exactly sure.

I was thinking that the GIs in World War II were from, a lot of them from New York, and they might have bastardized, if I can say that, a tout-a-leur with their Brooklyn and Bronx accents into toodaloo, you know, like that.

So I’ve thought about this, and after hearing your show, I thought you might be able to shed some light on that.

Well, I’ve got to tell you, I love the thinking that you’re doing.

I’m going to give you an A-plus on part of it and an F-minus on part of it.

Oh, that stings.

I’m teasing. I thought you could take it. You sound like you could take it.

Tough New Yorker.

Yeah, exactly. I’m an ex-New Yorker, so I appreciate the toughness of a New Yorker.

I got to tell you, the part that I really like here is the French origin for tout le, a tout le, which basically means see you later.

So it’s colloquial in French, and it became colloquial in English in the early 1900s, so it’s earlier than World War II.

And it pops up in kind of the hip, cool set in London, like the dancey, drinky, clubby types who kind of go around, the young folk, you know, the people, kind of the high life that people were living before World War I set in, those kinds of folks.

And so it has a long life in the U.K., pops over to the U.S. here and there.

But still in the language of a lot of Americans, toodaloo, especially if you had pip pip at the end, strikes them as British.

It’s stereotypically British, even though it’s long since out of fashion.

So the part you’re right on, I believe that it does come from the French and the part that you’re not right on.

And it’s not Americans who did it. It’s the British who did it.

-huh. Well, and then we got it from the British.

Yeah, exactly. One thing that happened in the popularization of this term, it was shortened to Toodles.

Do you remember the television show Gidget with Sally Field?

Unfortunately, I do.

Oh, what?

Well, Gidget used Toodles all the time on the show to say goodbye.

And so for a lot of people, this is back when there weren’t that many channels to choose from, and whatever was on was whatever was on.

And I believe that that is a source of popularizing the shortened form in the United States.

Well, I appreciate it because this, you know, I need to get a life.

Instead of wondering where the derivation of a tutelur and tuteloo and all that.

No, that’s a fine life. Keep it up.

Okay, I’ll call again.

I will write you a doctor’s note. You have my permission.

Thank you so, so much.

Pam, you’re a delight.

Thanks for calling.

Really appreciate it.

Thanks, Pam.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

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