Abstract
There is a rare slangy British English phrase to lie doggo “to lie hid”. The earliest known example is dated in the OED to 1882. Doggo looks like dog + o (with -o, as in weirdo, typo, and so forth), but a formation consisting of an animal name followed by the suffix -o would have no analogs. Some light on the origin of lie doggo may fall from the Modern Icelandic idiom sitja upp við dogg ‘to sit or half-lie, supporting oneself with elbows’. Doggur, known from texts since the eighteenth century, occurs with several other verbs. Also, sitja eins og doggur ‘sit motionless, look distraught’ and vera eins og doggur ‘to be motionless’ exist. Doggur has nothing to do with dogs, because the Scandinavian word for “dog” is hund-. The origin of the English noun dog is obscure, but, contrary to the almost universal opinion, the word is not totally isolated. In some German dialects, the diminutive forms dodel, döggel, and the similar-sounding tiggel ~ teckel occur. Perhaps dog and its continental look-alikes were originally baby words. The same sound complexes as above sometimes mean ‘a cylindrical object’ (such are Icelandic doggur and Middle High German tocke). Two of the basic meanings of those words were probably ‘round stick; doll’. Although the evidence is late, we can risk suggesting that lie doggo also contains the name of some device that was current not too long ago in the European itinerant handymen’s lingua franca. The overall image looks nearly the same as in the phrase dead as a doornail. In English, folk etymology connected doggo with the animal name and misled even professional lexicographers and etymologists. Finally, of some relevance is the English idiom it rains cats and dogs, whose forgotten earliest form was it rains cats and dogs and pitchforks with their points downwards. Apparently, the original idea was that a downpour of sharp objects fell to the ground.
Highlights
There is a rare slangy British English phrase to lie doggo “to lie hid”
At the crest of the Neogrammarian euphoria, the phrase the science of etymology gained ground, and a science it was, though it shared the weaknesses of every field of knowledge: the foundation looked and often proved to be solid, even though the buildings erected on it developed multiple cracks
As a reaction to this state of affairs, at the beginning of the twentieth century, a romantic school sprang up (Leo Spitzer and other Romance scholars) that emphasized the role of inspiration in etymology
Summary
Nineteenth-century historical linguists had every right to celebrate its victories. Thanks to Rasmus Rask, Jacob Grimm, and their followers, it became possible to lay bare the ties, previously hidden, but even unthinkable. 1) A word has been given up as hopeless, but a convincing guess exists, hidden in an obscure place This is how I came to know the origin of the English word slang. English philologists, in turn, had no notion of Pimpf and overlooked the only cognate that would have explained how pimp was coined (see the etymology of slang, dwarf, yet, and pimp in Liberman, 2008). English etymologists are not certain whether fog ‘mist’ and fog ‘second crop of grass; aftermath’ are connected If they were aware of the Russian words par ‘steam’ and par ‘a field left unsown for one year’, they might have felt more secure. Chance is inseparable from a goal-oriented effort, but it still remains chance; my respectful attitude toward serendipity, and it is to serendipity that I’ll devote the rest of this paper, dedicated to Ērika Sausverde, with her talent for finding great things “accidentally” and putting them to use
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