Was “dotard” used in the news on TV ? I am asking b/c it never showed up on my CC , crap CC sucks !
I think maybe Agatha Cristie used in a book. I have no cite, it’s been a while.
So, does that make John McCain old Mr. Wilson? 
I know I was out of the country awhile, but I am honestly surprised “dotard” is such a mystery to anyone. Has it really been out of use for such a long time?
Dotage and dotty have been in my vocabulary since my teens but I don’t think I’ve ever heard dotard until now.
Yes, I had never heard of it until this week but I could figure out roughly what it means just by the assumed sound. I don’t think it was ever in common use at all. I have never heard anyone ever actually use it but I will be using it all the time now. I know a whole bunch of old retards and, the beauty of it is, that they won’t even know what I am talking about.
I’ve long known the word (at least by 6th grade, prolly earlier than that) and thought it was strange that so many recently indicated they did not. But then I’ve been caught off-guard several times by whole groups of people when I used words like “curmudgeon” and “bailiwick” and “philanthropy” in public, so what do I know about what words other people know?
I dispute that it was not in common use in recent times. But I guess it really has been awhile.
I never heard it until the other day, and I still won’t be adding it to my vocabulary 
.
That’s me to. As well as “Dote on” to mean make a grandparental fuss over.
When I first read this thread I assumed that dotard, like libtard, was a fresh coinage meant specifically to insult. Perhaps a combo of Homer Simpson’s trademark D’oh! and -tard as short for retarded = mentally deficient person. My mental pronunciation was “doe-TARD” to match. I now suspect the correct pronunciation is more like “DOT-herd” or “DOT-erd” or even “DOT-<schwa>rd”
You have to admit D’oh-tard is a pretty apt term for our own Dear Leader. He’s not real well-informed and is continually slapping his figurative forehead as he learns some new fact then blusters his way into convincing no-one but himself that he already knew all that stuff and had been planning accordingly all along.
I think it came up once on a "Word of the Day"app a few years ago, but I don’t recall ever seeing it used in context. But I’ve read a ton of stuff over the years, and it could be one of those words where I figured out its meaning *in situ *, but never committed it to memory.
I knew the word, but thought it was spelled “doddard,” related to “doddering.”
Yes, my father had all his 19-century British fiction books from college, so since I was a kid.
Right now when reading the OP, if it sticks. Not my first language though.
I thought I had come across the word (or at least a form of it) too many years ago to count.
It seems there is an unrelated word, dodder. Having heard, but never seeing written, the phrase ‘doddering old man’, made me think I understood what a dotard was.
I have a degree in journalism and worked in communications for my entire career. I had absolutely no memory of either seeing of hearing that word before this week.
Learned it in the early70s.
Mom would sit mke down with a copy of Readers Digest’s Improve Your Vocabulary feature, & if I got them all right, she’d buy me a comic book.
FWIW, Théoden’s response is also classic, even somewhat relevant to current events, but I can’t do justice to it from faulty memory only, and I can’t find my copy of The Two Towers just now – a little help, anyone?
Pardon, I am confused. The quote given above is Saruman’s rejoinder to the quote I was asking for help on. That response by Théoden was to a prior offer of peace by Saruman. The missing quote is a most elegantly worded statement of “kiss my ass.”
Carry on.
That’s the line that prompted the Dotard speech. I remember learning the word when I first read LOTR in the seventies. Currently, I frequently blame mistakes I make on the fact that I am “in my dotage.”