Oh dear, not again. Derived from YIKE 'An imitative cry of the woodpecker'.
1889- 'The yikeing laugh of the green moorland woodpecker' and 1891 ' (the
green woodpecker's) maniacal yikes' etc etc. OED.
I do not wish to go back further.
On 14 July 2012 10:56, Patrick McManus <[log in to unmask]>wrote:
> Dave Bircumshaw and Robin hamilton will surely tell us all right back to
> the
> caves and ice ages maybe it means watch out here comes a hungry sabre tooth
> tiger
> P the etc of poetry etc
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Poetryetc: poetry and poetics [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On
> Behalf Of Max Richards
> Sent: 14 July 2012 07:18
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: YIKES!!! the word
>
> I noticed this subject heading just after my wife used it in an SMS, saying
> to me Great word, yikes.
> Then she said she thought it was Australian.
> Yes, no doubt, I said, but before that American and maybe also British.
> All we can find online so far is this:
>
> yikes
> exclamation of alarm or surprise, by 1953; perhaps from yoicks, a call in
> fox-hunting, attested from c.1770. Yike "a fight" is slang attested from
> 1940, of uncertain connection.
>
> Not very helpful.
> Whose slang first?
> Maybe one of those American words spread via comic books to everywhere in
> the English-speaking world.
> Might it have a Yiddish origin?
>
> Max without dictionaries just now.
>
>
> On 13/07/2012, at 1:54 AM, Uche Ogbuji wrote:
>
> > On Thu, Jul 12, 2012 at 2:37 AM, chris Jones <[log in to unmask]>
> wrote:
> >
> >> On 12/07/12 00:51, Uche Ogbuji wrote:
> >>
> >>> I used to use Lyx, but for a long time I've used wiki-like text,
> >>> which is even simpler than HTML
> >>>
> >>
> >>
> >> thanks for the tip.
>
--
David Joseph Bircumshaw
**
Website and A Chide's Alphabet
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