The Fascinating World of Oodle Words – Part II

Last week I looked at verbs containing the *oodle* string and suggested there was some sound symbolism going on. I didn’t mention three verbs linked by the idea of snuggling or being close, to croodle (1788), canoodle (1864) and snoodle (1887), the first and last being dialectal.

Crowdle.., to creep close together, as children round the fire, or chickens under the hen.

But this week we’re concentrating on the nouns, and what a cornucopia (1611) we have.

The OED lets you sort your choices by frequency, by date or by alphabetical order. If you choose frequency, guess which noun comes top? (I’ll let you in on that at the end.)

But sorting by date is more up my Strasse at the moment, as I love finding out how old – or new – a word is.

The oldest *oodle* in the OED is a 1542 noun based on a sound, only cited twice there and both times in works by Nicholas Udall, headmaster of Eton and Westminster (not concurrently, silly!), convicted sodomite and author of the comedy Ralph Roister Doister, in his translation of Erasmus’ Apophthegms.

His instrumente wheron to plaie toodle loodle bagpipe.

That’s followed by another musical – or quite possibly, unmusical – sound sometime before 1566 in the reduplicative shape of toodle-toodle, defined as ‘an imitation of the sound of a pipe or flute.’ Thankfully obsolete, says the OED.

But then we come onto a sound that’s alive and kicking and might even wake you up if you live in the country, as noted in Gabriel Harvey’s letter-book in 1573:

The yung cockerels… followid after with a cockaloodletoo as wel as ther strenhth wuld suffer them.

Nowadays we generally transcribe it as cock-a-doodle-doo. Which could lead onto how other languages transcribe the ‘same’ sound, e.g. French cocorico, Russian кукарекý (kukareku) or German kikeriki. Further than that we won’t go here. I rather like the spelling strenhth.

Sadly, the OED declares obsolete the restorative cock-a-doodle-do broth (1856), ‘a restorative drink consisting of beaten eggs mixed with either brandy or sherry’, to which one recipe adds milk and sugar. Perhaps better that way; otherwise it sounds like raw zabaglione.

In several nouns the dominant idea is foolishness. Earliest is the 1664 compound fopdoodle, adding the 1629 doodle to fop and first cited in Samuel Butler’s Hudibras but now obsolete.

Sometime around 1670 gives us fadoodle, ‘something foolish or ridiculous; nonsense’ which the OED double-whammies as ‘obsolete’ and ‘rare’. Its formation is ‘arbitrary’, i.e. it’s completely made up out of thin air but with that significant sememe oodle (which Grammarly wants to correct to *sememeoodle, which won’t do at all!).

Still in the 17C we’re regaled in rhyme, no less, with Tom doodle, ‘a clown, a fool; a stupid or foolish person, an oaf’

The first that appeard was a great Tom-a-doodle | With a Cap like Bushel, to cover his Noddle.

E. Ward, O Raree Show

before we reach the 1720 noodle, which, sadly, does not relate to the food noodle and therefore doesn’t allow me to apply the conceptual metaphor ‘stupid people are a foodstuff’ ‘as in e.g. dough ball or gammon. The OED suggests the origin is noddle, as in the quote above, meaning ‘the back of the head; the nape of the neck’.

Image courtesy of Charles Deluvio on Unsplash.

The incomestible – well, I just made that up, though it’s in Spanish, too – noodle, then, has had varied offspring, hopefully self-explanatory: noodledom (1810), noodledum (1821; a foolish person. I love this one!), noodleism (1829), noodlehead (1835) and – surprisingly modern –  noodleness (1931).

My favourite ‘foolish’ word containing *oodle* must be flapdoodle:

‘The gentleman has eaten no small quantity of flapdoodle in his lifetime.’ ‘What’s that, O’Brien?’ replied I… ‘Why, Peter,’ rejoined he, ‘it’s the stuff they feed fools on.’

F. Marryat, Peter Simple, 1834

I couldn’t finish this piece without mentioning:

caboodle – before 1848, possibly a clipping of the phrase kit and boodle, boodle (1625) being borrowed from Dutch boedel, ‘property’;

Yankee doodle – 1786, ‘the title of a popular air of the United States of America, considered to be characteristically national’ and then for ‘yankee’ in 1787.

And what about jolly old oodle as in oodles of something? It’s yet another gift from US English to World English and is of mid-19C vintage, well, sometime before 1867, apparently. The OED suggests it might be a shortening of the slang scadoodles, with the same meaning, or the boodle already mentioned.

With that, it just remains for me to say, as some kind readers have suggested, cheerio, toodle-oo (1907) and toodle-pip (1977) as I pootle off (1973) to potter about (1824 in that meaning) in the meadows of English vocabulary.

Image courtesy of Fredrik Öhlander on Unsplash.

** The top *oodle* by frequency is, natch, the poodle.