Eggcorn Forum

“Shilly-shally,” meaning “to vacillate,” came into common use in the eighteenth century. It derives from the seventeenth century expression “shall I, shall I” which was modified to “shill I, shall I” and later converted to a compound word.

On at least a dozen web pages we find the variant “silly-shally” and “silly sally” used with the same meaning. The substitution of “silly” may be an eggcorn: certain meanings of “silly” (e.g., confused) could be effective semantic replacements for the dithering implied by “shilly-shally.” The idiom “to drink oneself silly” and the behavior of the product “silly putty” may also lend hints of waffling and confusion to “silly.”

Possibly contamination from the expression “dilly dally” may have led people to drop the “h” in “shilly-shally.” Alternately, the substitution may have been greased by a twongue tister I learned as a child. The one that starts “Silly Sally sells seashells by the seashore,” leads, by about the third repetition, to “Shilly Shally shells….”

Examples:

Quotation from a 1990 book by Maurice Sendak (I don’t have the book to check out whether Sendak was misquoted or whether the error is Sendak’s): “Max doesn’t silly-shally about.” (http://tinyurl.com/64ltzw)

Forum post: “i don’t know whether my choice is right or not, but it is seems i didn’t do any preperation for the quitting, silly-shally whether [to] leave or not bother[s] me a lot. ” (http://www.mylot.com/w/discussions/1539820.aspx)

From a play: “I want this moment to last forever, to silly-shally with an inspiring partner….” (http://www.bukvite.com/poem.php?docid=45662)