Ditto

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Dr. Goodword
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Ditto

Postby Dr. Goodword » Mon Apr 11, 2022 6:18 pm

• ditto •


Pronunciation: dit-o • Hear it!

Part of Speech: Noun

Meaning: 1. The aforesaid, the same as was just spoken or printed above. 2. The same or similar thing.

Image

Notes: While today's word has a meager lexical family, it itself may be used as an adjective (a ditto day) or verb (to ditto what somebody else says). Rush Limbaugh fans called themselves dittoheads, and dittoship and dittology have all had brief careers in the past. Ditto is usually symbolized with the double quote sign (").

In Play: Ditto is a silly option to avoid repetition in a language that is rife with repetition: "Jack Daniels came to work Monday morning rather the worse for liquor and it was said, ditto last night." Repetitions like 'red, red rose' and 'Sing! Sing! Sing!' are commonplace in English: "Agnes came to the party in dittos of Maude Lynn Dresser's attire."

Word History: Today's Good Word was borrowed from the Tuscan dialect of Italian, ditto "(in) the said (month or year)", a variant of literary Italian detto "(already) said", the past participle of dire "to say". The Italian word is a reduction of Latin dicere "speak, tell, say", found in many English borrowings like dictate, predict, dictionary. Latin inherited its word from PIE root deik- "to show, say emphatically", source also of Old English tæcan "to show", Modern English teach, Ancient Greek deiknyein "to show, indicate", German zeigen "to show", and Latin digitus "finger", a pointer, indicator. (Let's hope this contribution by the good Doctor himself is no ditto of any other dictionary's entry for today's silly Good Word.)
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bbeeton
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Re: Ditto

Postby bbeeton » Mon Apr 11, 2022 8:04 pm

This also used to be a mechanism for making copies using a spirit duplicator. My mother was a second-grade teacher. She would create worksheets or assignments for her pupils by writing on a master sheet with a special purple pencil, press that against a gelatin sheet, and then use that to imprint the contents on blank sheets of paper. Very messy.

With care, the ditto master could be used more than once, but it couldn't produce as many copies from a single master as one could using the next step up, a mimeograph stencil. Ah, these lost arts!

LukeJavan8
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Re: Ditto

Postby LukeJavan8 » Wed Apr 13, 2022 4:48 pm

In high school I was the "official" ditto person. The school was tired
of breakdowns of the machine, the old "too many cooks" bit.
So they had all teachers put their work in a wire basket, and after
school I got to work. I knew the machine and could fix it after
a number of hiccups.
-----please, draw me a sheep-----

George Kovac
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Re: Ditto

Postby George Kovac » Mon Apr 25, 2022 1:03 pm

I ditto Dr Goodword's conclusion that "ditto" is a silly word, with limited contemporary value.

But I enjoy the concept of the ditto as a remembrance of technologies past--and not just the "ditto machines" referenced in the posts by bbeeton and Luke.

Today, on our word processors, we "cut and paste" repetitive material with ease. Those young enough to have never used a typewriter would be puzzled by the concept of the ditto.

There is a nostalgic charm to reading old documents in which the ditto appears, either typed or handwritten. Government records and business orders often are replete with long columns of dittos. I find an appealing quaintness to these doubled quotation marks, stacked up on top of each other like college cheerleaders or circus acrobats. I recently researched various census records from the late nineteenth/early twentieth century to find information about my grandparents. I tried to imagine the bored clerks and census interviewers with their massive books of columns, writing hundreds of dittos all day long to note that the address or country of birth of one entrant was the same as the one above. How many of these Bartlebys thought "I would prefer not to" and yet needed the job and were grateful for the dittos which sped their repetitive work?
"Every battle of ideas is fought on the terrain of language." Zia Haider Rahman, New York Times 4/8/2016

LukeJavan8
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Re: Ditto

Postby LukeJavan8 » Mon Apr 25, 2022 1:25 pm

Terrific memories.
-----please, draw me a sheep-----

bbeeton
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Re: Ditto

Postby bbeeton » Mon Apr 25, 2022 3:31 pm

It has just struck me that, although the symbol for ditto is nominally a double right-hand close quote, using the "curly" variety looks pretty awful. The strokes should really be more vertical, or not explicitly oriented at all. (Disoriented?) Shadows of a time when typewriters were more limited than computer font collections, or even what was available with movable metal type.

George Kovac
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Re: Ditto

Postby George Kovac » Mon Apr 25, 2022 5:42 pm

Shadows of a time when typewriters were more limited than computer font collections, or even what was available with movable metal type.

Yes, typewritten dittos were always uncurved lines, a limitation of the keyboard options in the mechanical era. "Smart" quotation marks--like italics or boldface or dashes that weren't just doubled hyphens--were not available on typewriters. On the other hand, handwritten ditto marks, perhaps inadvertantly, often featured a bit of a curve, perhaps because that is similar to the way we write commas, or because most scriveners were right handed. I doubt that most folks back in the ditto era gave much thought to the difference between the two possible type faces of ditto marks. The dilemma is really a classical one of translation--how does one represent an aesthetic that is an anachronism or a cultural difference?
"Every battle of ideas is fought on the terrain of language." Zia Haider Rahman, New York Times 4/8/2016

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Slava
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Re: Ditto

Postby Slava » Mon Apr 25, 2022 7:46 pm

I thought they were supposed to be two parallel lines going straight down, an equals sign on end. At least in writing.
Life is like playing chess with chessmen who each have thoughts and feelings and motives of their own.

bbeeton
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Re: Ditto

Postby bbeeton » Mon Apr 25, 2022 8:34 pm

Another possibility is a double prime. That doesn't have any curvature, although it does have a slant. I like that better than a rotated equal sign.
Sorry, Slava; your suggestion does exhibit logic, but here I favor appearance.

(I'm a bit of a type nerd, also with a long background in typesetting math, so can get insufferable about such topics.)


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