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Chris -- 2025-05-10
as those in their doltage are want to do:
HERB CAEN—A Dottering Old Guy.
I think it is possible for one to be old and acute or one can be old and dottering. Here is a link suggesting that McCain is the latter.
I long for the days when we forgave dottering old folks a bit of anachronistic behavior with a …. Old maybe, dottering maybe not so much.
…and many more.
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If it’s standard for some (and the repetition in a number of cases suggests that it is) and for some of them it is understood in connection with dotty ‘(mildly/harmlessly) insane’ I think it’s an eggcorn. Of course the usual other analyses are available for many cases: e.g. phonetic spelling of “doddering†without any semantic reshaping, purposeful wordplay, blending with tottering/dawdling , etc.
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Many of us probably have an image of dottiness having to do with the incompleteness of a dotted line as opposed to a normally-filled-in line, and a similar image deriving from dot may be independently active here in restructuring “dodderingâ€â€”perhaps some see it as active in dotage as well. (I’m not sure if I myself do/did or not.)
Last edited by DavidTuggy (2009-12-21 17:50:21)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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The OED has an entry for the verb “dotter.” It means “to move unsteadily.” But it marks it as “obsolete or dialectical” and the most recent citation is from the late 1700s.
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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