Dictionaries agree that the word has been in the language since the 16th Century, but they offer no help as to its origin. It doesn’t even seem like an English word to me. Does anyone have an hypothesis?
From diletto, Italian for “joy,” “delight,” “pleasure.”
I wonder if there is a connection with ‘diddle’ in the sense of female masturbation?
As a refrain in ballads, it’s probably just a nonsense word that trips easily off the tongue-- You get a lot of those in some cultures’ music. I suppose that it’s possible that some ballad or another used it in that way, and the word made it into the language from the song.
Fascinating stuff, thanks
From the cited article:
Etymonline.com says:
If diddle comes from “to totter” that also implies a moving about. The article says dildo implies a moving back and forth motion similar to fuck. So it’s hard to say whether they are actively related or the similarity of sounds and meanings led them to be conflated in ordinary speech.
To make it, you use dill dough.
While we are on the subject of dildos; do lesbians, who purportedly don’t want a phallus anywhere near, actually buy and use phallus-shaped dildos?
I misread the thread title as Deprivation of "dildo" and thought this was about some landmark human rights court ruling. =/
By whom is this purported?
This is from modern “comedian”, Dane Cook.
Thanks for bumping the thread up. (At least I hope you were bumping it up. I’m never sure what these terse short responses mean.)
I wasn’t really bumping the thread. It wasn’t long since the last reply, so it hadn’t sunk very far on the thread list. I was asking a question.