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July 22, 2004

A doozy!

Words are cool. Occasionally I'll use a word like "doozy" - like I did earlier today, and wonder where the heck a word like that originated from.

My colleague George Bilbrey whom I sit by during the day at the office was fortunate/unfortunate enough to have taken (was forced to take) Latin. He's a good resource for etymology. No luck on doozy though.

A few years back when I was in Client Engineering at MessageMedia - we had opened up MessageMedia Europe. The Europeans sent over some French guys so we could ramp them up on Client Engineering. I recall speaking with "Jerome" and using the term "doozy". He said, "What is this - doozy?" and I simply could not find a way to convey it, so picked another word.

Thanks to Google, mystery solved. What I like about Google is that they seem to think of everything. I entered "doozy" into my Firefox Google toolbar and got these results.

I've always been bummed that Google didn't have a direct "dictionary" search, but today I noticed on every result page, off to the top right there was the following:

Results 1 - 10 of about 64,000 for doozy [definition]. (0.20 seconds)

Aha! Definition links to any keyword searched in Google! Sweet!

So mystery solved. This is "doozy":

Something extraordinary or bizarre: "Among the delicious names taken by, or given to, minor political parties in the United States... are these doozies: Quids, Locofocos, Barnburners, Coodies, Hunkies, Bucktails" (Saturday Review).

and I like the possible origin:

[Possibly blend of daisy, and Duesenberg, a luxury car of the late 1920s and 1930s.]

So there you go, word of the day (as if there are not enough of those on the web anymore).

Posted by gcrgcr at July 22, 2004 10:42 AM

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