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Thanks for your understanding.
Chris -- 2018-04-11
Google hits on Jan 1, 2008
39,900 “ditzy blonde”
46,200 “dizzy blonde”
“Ditzy” means scatterbrained, and one might well describe a scatterbrained person with the sensation of dizziness. Perhaps the only thing standing in the way of this being an eggcorn is the etymology of ditzy; one reference source suggests that “ditzy” might derive from dotty + dizzy.
Examples:
FOXNews.com – No More Moving – Juliet Huddy | Mike Jerrick |...
You might have been able to figure that out by the “dizzy blonde” ... Sorry, but YOU DEFINE dizzy blonde. You are there ONLY because of your looks. ...
www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,196672,00.html – 43k – Similar pages
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,196672,00.html
Amazon.com: E. A Solinas “ea_soli…’s review of Lost in …...
And the quiet dialogue has a witty, acerbic edge, such as when dizzy blonde Kelly announces “I’m under Evelyn Waugh,” only to have Charlotte inform her that …
www.amazon.com/review/R1MS65XNR9IN0O – 121k – Similar pages
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Though I’ve used Google in a similar fashion, it can be a snare and a delusion. It only shows you what’s trendy right now, or in the recent past since most web sites were created, not what was historically common.
Google Book Search is enlightening. When you limit your search to “full view†books—that mostly means pre-1923 books whose copyrights have expired—you get 7 hits on “dizzy blonde†but only 2 on “ditzy blonde.â€
Three books mention a racehorse named Dizzy Blonde. Those date to 1895, 1896 and 1898.
“…catching the forelock of that dizzy blonde, ...â€â€”from Yawps and Other Things, by William James Lampton, 1900.
“Finally, Tom got a case on a swell New York heiress, a dizzy blonde, who was just simply It in the Four Hundred.â€â€”from The Picaroons, by Gelett Burgess and Will Irwin, 1904.“The third and last specimen evidently came from a young old lady who desired to make herself into a dizzy blonde!â€â€”from Bulletin of Pharmacy, 1904.
“Return of the wanderer, accompanied by dizzy blonde!â€â€”from A Damsel in Distress, by P. G. Wodehouse, 1919.
The two examples of “ditzy blonde†come from 2003 and 2007. (I know the term is older than that, but that’s all you get with Google Book Search limited to “full view.â€)
I’ve also found examples of “ditsy blonde.â€
Last edited by Jim Dixon (2008-01-03 19:03:58)
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Well, I seem to have fallen victim to what Arnold Zwicky has called the “antiquity illusion”: the erroneous impression that a verbal phenomenon that’s very familiar to you must have been around a long time. (See his Language Log post here: http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/language … 02862.html). I would have bet that “ditzy/ditsy” was a word that had been around since at least the 20s or 30s. But the OED gives 1978 (no, really!) as the date of the earliest citation for the word. And it’s only in 1980 that they start showing citations for the current meaning. Using books.google.com, the earliest citation I could find for “ditzy blond” was from 1986 in a book on women in comedy (it appears as “ditsy blonde” there).
Digging further, I noticed that the original meaning of “dizzy” is “stupid, foolish.” According to the OED, that sense has been dialectal the last few centuries, but they do give an instance from 1893. I don’t know whether the contemporary use of “ditzy” might be related to that or not.
Books.google.com did return one interesting hit for “ditzy” from (apparently) 1961 that looked relevant to this discussion, but they don’t allow a preview. And books.google.com dates always need to be double-checked, so I’ll have to see if I can find the book in a library.
Last edited by patschwieterman (2008-01-05 00:19:46)
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