…meant (run out of space)?
I had no idea, and couldn’t even begin to hazard a guess, beyond a drugs connection and dope as in dopey.
I actually stumbled across the board before the Straightdope homepage. And no, I didn’t know what it was.
My (Irish) boss showed me the SD site back in '97, but he was also into the Word Detective and other ignorance-fighting stuff. Don’t know how he knew about it. But when yojimbo introduced me to the boards, I was already aware of the Straight Dope.
Do you mean: “Did you have to look up the definition of “straight dope” because it is an American idiom and didn’t know what it means?”
If that’s the question, then the answer is that I got the pun immediately.
I knew what ‘the straight dope’ meant, must’ve heard it in a cowboy film or something (is that possible?) I found the homepage on some random web search and spent days reading all the archives. I did not know about the history of the Straight Dope - Cecil’s column’n’that.
I had a vague idea that the phrase “the straight dope” meant the straight facts or something along those lines, so I didn’t have to look further into it. However, I’ve had to explain what it means to every person I’ve ever mentioned the boards to. Generally I begin explaining straight away, as I do not want people to think that I’m a member of a drug board, because that’s the usual assumption.
Wait, “straight dope” is a pun? I don’t get it.
I too was only dimly aware of what the phrase means, but it soon becomes clear from context. I had never heard of The Straight Dope, of course, and I can’t remember how I ended up here.
I’m not a “foreigner,” but I had never heard the term “the straight dope” before stumbling across the SD back in its AOL days. It was in perusing the site (the old cartoony one, with links to the message board, columns, etc) that I figured out what it meant.
Gotta say even to this day, I’ve never heard the term used anywhere else except in some connection to the Chicago Reader.
Well maybe I’m reading too much into it.
Straight - not high on drugs / legal / true.
Dope - drugs / information.
So it’s either true information, or it’s drugs that are legal or don’t get you high.
If this is an existing phrase with none of these meanings, then I’ve got all the above terribly wrong.
Any drug entendre is unintended. “Getting the dope” on something had its origins in horse racing and referred to getting inside information on horses, particularly with regards to whether horses had been drugged. Getting the “straight dope” eventually acquired a generic connotation for simply getting the real info (as opposed to BS) about something.
I had no clue what ‘Straight Dope’ meant or what it was until finding this place.
I have never before or since seen or heard a reference to it anywhere other than this message board, the homepage, or any links followed from or as a result of this message board.
Hey! Who’s a furriner? I was borned here!
Um. I followed a link from someone’s personal page while I was looking for good flash games to put on my site. The site did not last, but the Straight Dope stuck.
I did know. Probably from watching old TV shows or reading novels.
To put it in context, when using the term it is best to be wearing a fedora and a trench coat 
Can’t remember where I first heard the term “straight dope”, but I’m sure it was a long, long time before I found the board …
I had heard of dope before in the context of “what’s the dope” as in “what’s the gen” but I had never heard of the Straight Dope in relation to the Chicago Reader. I found the site through another message board which had doper members.
I had no idea what the phrase *straight dope * meant and assumed that it was drug-related. Once I had read some of the posts I realised what it actually meant.
I first saw the name in a link on a blog I read, plus the blurb “world’s most intelligent discussion forum”, or some such. I’m not sure if it was because I was threatened by the description or baffled by the name, but it was several months (probably more like a year) before I clicked that link.
As I was getting introduced to the boards, these “doper” people invited me to a “dopefest”, and I politely declined because drugs aren’t my thing. :smack:
In my defense, the whole decriminalization of marijuana stuff had just started up here in Canada, and so I just assumed…