to-do » ta-do

Variant(s):  ta do, tado, ta-doo, ta doo, tadoo

Classification: English

Spotted in the wild:

  • “A festuche is a brohaha or a big deal or a tado.” (link)
  • “Plus we’ve both been married before and knew that we didn’t want a big tadoo.” (link)
  • “The local media made a big ta do about the opening of the dealership and the test drives they offered.” (link)
  • “Plus, it’s all pretty much taken care of by the time we arrive and I don’t have to make a big ta-do out of it.” (link)
  • “Out in PA, there’s a big ta-doo over hiring more police. WHAT THE FUCK FOR?!” (link)
  • “It wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be, we had a big ta doo with NTL and had solicitor letters etc but in the end they backed down …” (link)

The first cite I came across in writing Language Log posting of 7 September 2006 on an entirely different subject. As I said there, “ta-do” and its variants seem to have “to-do” reshaped to echo the “ta-DAH” that introduces some big announcement, imitating a trumpet flourish. Googling on <"a big tado"> gets 43 raw webhits, most of them relevant; the more clearly onomatopoetic <"a big tadoo"> gets even more, 95; <"a big ta-do">, with its visual separation into two parts, gets 267, of both “a big ta-do” and “a big ta do”; and <"a big ta-doo"> gets 54 more, of both “a big ta-doo” and “a big ta doo”.

[Added 15 September 2006: Doug Kenter suggests that “whoopdedoo” might have contributed to the reshaping.]

| 3 comments | link | entered by Arnold Zwicky, 2006/09/08 |