My last post included a picture of the one lilac blossom blooming in my yard. Mindy of The Suburban Life blog commented that she loved lilacs but that they made her sneeze “like the dickens” followed by a question: Where does that saying come from?
It clearly doesn’t take much to entertain me because I took her question as an assignment. My next quest for the day. OK. Well, it didn’t really take me a day to figure this out, but I did think about it a lot! I’m devoted to the topic of names and I include words as part of my passion because, words are names too. (They get offended if you leave them out!)
I used to hear my dad scream from the other room, “Where the dickens are my shoes!” That usually was code word for us kids to scram. Because although dickens is not considered foul language, it’s a precursor (pardon the pun) and it indicated patience was running thin. Or it meant you left his shoes outside when you were trying to make a scarecrow yesterday. Either way, the further you were from the scene of any crime, the better!
So, tell me. How many of you thought that when we say, “like the dickens” that it was some reference to Charles Dickens. It’s a mistake made by many people with a lack of understanding of the saying’s origins. (I didn’t know it either, but don’t tell anyone.)
Charles is actually off the hook because “what the dickens” dates back further than his appearance in history. But his surname may be given some credit. Back in the day Dickens was a substitute used in place of the word Devil. The Devil. Voldemort. These are characters who fall in the “he who must not be named” category so other names are used in their place.
World Wide Words says that the first recorded use of the phrase was William Shakespeare in “the Merry Wives of Windsor.” You want to see the line? I thought you might. Here it is:
FORD: Where had you this pretty weathercock?
MRS PAGE: I cannot tell what the dickens his name is my husband had him of”.
Mr. Quinion describes how the pun in this script relies on the audience “knowing that Dickens was a personal name and that what the dickens was a mild oath which called on the Devil.”
Now, Mindy, you know what the dickens that saying means! Anybody else have any assignments for me?