Hi
Can anyone tell me if the following use of “ditto” is correct?
“I promptly set out for the mountain. Ditto my friends.”
I look forward to your feedback.
That’s common usage.There are examples on this site.
Ditto has pretty much fallen out of use these days. In my experience it was hardly ever used verbally and it was mainly seen in handwritten lists to save laboriously copying the same description over and over. Commonly, “ditto” would be used once, and subsequent lines would have ditto marks** -"-**.
“I promptly set out for the mountain, as did my friends.”
Shirts, white, short sleeved, size 14
--------------ditto----------------size 15
----------------"------------------size 16
----------------"------------------size 17
Shirts blue…etc
Since the advent of computers this system has been rendered unnecessary.
In the US, I pretty much only hear it conversationally, not in print or lists. I’ve only seen a double tick mark used to indicate repetition in a list.
It was common to abbreviate it as “do.” in lists. The full word was rarely used.
People who want to sound like they’re retro still say it.
Well, yes, this may be generationally dependent. As a child of the 80s, I guess I am, by definition, “retro,” so the word is used completely unironically/unselfconsciously when I hear it among my peers.
I can vouch for it being more common when handwriting or typesetting or whtever was laborious.
There’s a DW Griffith movie called Intolerance from 1916, with a curious example:
Now, I know what “ditto” means, and I knew what it meant when I was 15 and I saw this movie for the first time, but in that context, I still couldn’t help wondering if “ditto geese” were some special kind of geese. I mean, the word ditto had more letters than the word four.
I suppose there could have been a longer description of the hens, that got cut, or the word ditto was needed for better kerning, or DW Griffith just didn’t like the way it looked when the word “four” was repeated (so why no “six hens, four geese”?) I dunno. But Griffith’s intertitles were very carefully composed, not slopped together, so the “ditto” usage must have sounded like what people normally said in 1916. Things change.
“I miss mimeograph machines.”
“Ditto.”
There are also some followers of Rush Limbaugh, who like to refer to themselves as DITTOHEADS. 