Bueno - great find, Dominic!
Incredible how the phrase resonates and varies through time. I have always
heard variations on:
"So and so did X and they have 'dilly-dallied' their whole life since."
X must be a variation on the traumas of whatever happened to men to drive
them crazy in that Bombay alley, tropics, etc.
Around here (California) it's also a phrase parents and teachers yell out to
kids, "Quit dilly-dallying" and come to dinner, get in line, etc.
Generally a laggard! Thank God Whitman dilly-dallied. A poet's and dreamer's
disease!
Dim dally dally!
Stephen V
http://stephenvincent.net/blog/
> In +Service Slang+ (1943), collected by J.L.Hunt and A.G.Pringle, we have:
>
> DOOLALLY: Very drunk or temporarily insane, without distinction.
>
> There's a long entry in Beale/Partridge 8:
>
> (Scanned and OCRed but not proofed):
>
> doolally (or doolali). (Orig., and still, very occ. among old soldiers, the
> full form was/is doolally tap.) Off one's head; mad; 'he's gone doolally':
> orig., late C.19-mid-20, army s.; since then, much more widespread, and >
> gen. coll.; the abbr. doolally dates from ca. 1920; the occ. corrupt
> variants doodle-ally or doodally have crept in since ca. 1940. One
> derivation is ex Deolali, a military sanatorium in Bombay, and Hindustani
> tap, fever; however, the following long passage from Frank Richards, DCM,
> MM, Old Soldier Sahib, 1936, is worth quoting in full:
>
> 'The trooping season began in October and finished in
> March, so that time-expired men sent to Deolalie from their different units
> might have to wait for months before a troop-ship fetched them home ... The
> time-expired men at Deolalie had no arms or equipment; they showed kit now
> and again and occasionally went on a route-march, but time hung heavily on
> their hands and in some cases men who had been exemplary soldiers got into
> serious trouble and were awarded terms of imprisonment before they were sent
> home. Others contracted venereal and had to go to hospital. The well-known
> saying among soldiers when speaking of a man who does queer things, "Oh,
> he's got the Doo-lally tap," originated, I think, in the peculiar way men
> behaved owing to the boredom of that camp. Before I was time-expired myself
> (in 1909) the custom of sending time-expired men to Deolalie was abolished:
> they were sent direct to the ports of embarkation, which in some cases meant
> weeks of travelling, but they got on the troop-ship the day they arrived at
> the port.'
>
> (This author's knowledge of s. in the Army ranks of the early
> C.20 is prob. unrivalled.)-2. Hence, exceedingly drunk: army: from ca. 1930;
> by ca. 1950, ob. if not t. H. & P.-3. Of a machine, e.g., a vehicle, out of
> action, broken down: heard from a London bus conductor, 1983. (Mrs C. Raab.)
> Loosely ex sense 1.
>
> doolally-trapped. Knocked silly: low: from 1918; t. doolan. A policeman:
> Aus.: C.20. (D'Arcy Niland, The Big Smoke, 1959.) Prob. ex the Irish surname
> Doolan, there being so many Irishmen in the police force.
>
> dooley. See Larry Dooley.
>
> doolie. An ambulance: Anglo-Indian coll.: C.18-20. Ex the S.E. sense, a
> litter or a rudimentary palanquin (C.16+). Y. & B.
>
> A Hang Down Your Head Tom Doolally Rodent
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Christopher Walker" <[log in to unmask]>
> To: <[log in to unmask]>
> Sent: Thursday, December 15, 2005 9:37 PM
> Subject: Re: help!-----lost word
>
>
>> A small footnote to the doolally observations.
>>
>> Although the Deolali camp is often cited as the source, the (British run)
>> asylum, also in Deolali, is (I suspect) more probable. 'Ranchi' (< a later
>> asylum) is sometimes used in Indian English where a Briton might mutter
>> 'doolally'.
>>
>> Doolally doesn't appear in Hobson Jobson, which surprised me.
>>
>> CW
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>>
>> 'Think of a book inflicted on its author...' (Alan Sondheim)
>>
|