It’s a polite truncation of dipshit or dip-shit.
Thank you, maybe that was it. Anyway it certainly fits.
This is the original, i think
Damn, it wont let me upload it, but it was the three panel version.
Wait, wait; it still means a ‘clueless person’ in UK slang (I have no clear idea what a yoyo is - someone who vacillates up and down?).
Has the meaning of ‘jerk’ changed in US slang now? I see that the online dictionaries associate ‘jerk’ with a rude or annoying person nowadays - something that is not consistent with the Steve Martin film, in which he played a relatively likeable innocent.
I heard a pretty young person mention how, to paraphrase, some RGB color animation would make the lights gay; they were not talking about the light strip’s sexual orientation, nor was it a pejorative.
“Now” being “About forty years ago, give or take.” But yeah, in American English, a jerk is someone who is rude or insulting - a non-vulgar synonym for “asshole.”
Hence our prime rule here, “Don’t be a jerk”.
Etymonline says that “Dip” was first attested in the 1920s, where as Wiktionary says that “Dipshit” was first attested in the 1960s, so it would appear that the latter is a dysphemism of the former rather than the reverse.
Now, dipstick, on the other hand, that I can believe is a euphemism of dipshit.
Except that a “dipstick” is an actual thing. What’s a “dipshit”, beyond a vulgarization of “dip”?
I meant “dipstick” as in the rarely-used word for “idiot”, not the actual thing used to check fluid levels. It’s easier to see how it could be a euphemism for “dipshit” than to draw any connection between checking fluid levels and idiocy.
And possibly popularized by Sheriff Roscoe P. Coltrane.
“Embarrass” originally meant ‘to block,’ as an impediment in your way.
I’ve only ever heard ‘jerk’ used to mean someone rude or obnoxious, and I’m British…
Probably an age-related thing, then.
The Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang says “dip” is a back formation from “dippy”. Its first quotation for “dip” is from 1932 and the first for “dippy” is from 1899. First for “dipshit” is from 1962. It agrees that “dipstick” is a euphemism for “dipshit” and its first quotation is from 1963.
Same here. I’m a Yank, in my mid-60s.
The title of the Steve Martin picture never made sense to me, but it does now.
Along the same lines as The Jerk is Larry Shue’s 1981 stage play The Nerd, whose title character is written as a clueless bumbling oaf rather than a “Revenge of the Nerds” type.
Caveat/nitpick: Of course, the original meaning of “dipstick” as a “gauging rod”, i.e., literally a stick that is dipped into a vessel of liquid (an engine’s oil pan, a cask or barrel, etc.) to estimate its amount, goes back well into or beyond the 19th century. (Apparently along with a secondary, disparaging, application to some petty functionary, such as an excise officer, who wields the dipstick in formal inspections of commodities etc.)
But yeah, you’re right that appropriating the term “dipstick” as a euphemism for “dipshit”, unrelated to its original associations with measurement by a gauging rod, is only a few decades old.
THUG: Modern meaning: a violent, aggressive person, especially one who is a criminal.
Original meaning: a member of a group or organization of robbers and assassins in India who waylaid and strangled their victims, usually travelers, and stole their belongings. They were suppressed by the British in the 1830s. [Oxford Languages]
VANDAL: Modern meaning: one who willfully or ignorantly destroys, damages, or defaces property belonging to another or to the public
Original meaning: a member of a Germanic people who lived in the area south of the Baltic Sea between the Vistula and the Oder rivers, overran Gaul, Spain, and northern Africa in the fourth and fifth centuries a.d., and in 455 sacked Rome. [Merriam-Webster]
PHILISTINE: Modern meaning, one who does not appreciate culture or the arts. Original meaning, a member of the non-Semitic people who inhabited ancient Philistia. They were the enemy of the Ancient Jews, as noted in the Biblical story of David and Goliath.
Originally a military order/sect/whatever, not indie killers.
Titchy: modern meaning: very small.
Original meaning: a nickname for a very large man.
It originally came from The Tichbourne Claimant, a large man who impersonated the deceased heir to a family fortune.
Changed to modern meaning after Little Tich, a music hall performer. He was a very small man. His stage name was a humorous oxymoron, meaning the same as “tiny giant”.