Here's a question: In Webster's next dictionary, what word may soon pop up between dugout and DUI?
Duh.That's right. "Duh," the lowly, three-letter interjection and insult is hoping to take its place among the arcane, the polysylabic and the Latin-rooted in the official canon of American English.
The editors at Webster's have it on their short list, along with such current faves as phat and dis, and will decide soon the fate of duh.
So after 50 years of flying below linguists' radar, duh finally may rise into official view. As far as many people are concerned, there is no question about this one.
Duh has helped millions of people in countless conversations, and it's about time the little interjection got its due.
"What you're really doing is making a mocking comment of the person you're talking about," said Mike Agnes, Webster's editorial director and the man who will decide duh's fate. "It's instantly recognized, and there is an awful lot of meaning in that one word."
Like many words, duh began with kids. Its first recorded use came in a 1943 "Merrie Melodies" cartoon, but its popularity solidified sometime in the late 1950s as kids realized there was no known comeback to a good duh-ing.
It spent a couple of decades in its original form (the longer, lower-voiced "duuuuuuuuhhhhhh"), became the abbreviated (but still flat) duh by 1960, went negative in the early '80s with the Valley Girls' as "no duh" and in this decade has settled down as the plain old duh (upward intonation optional) in use today.
And in use, it is.
A quick content analysis shows its media appearances have risen a whopping 450 percent in the past two years. Even highbrow publications like The Washington Post can't seem to resist:
In fact, journalists lately have been hurling duhs with a kind of unrestrained frenzy, such as the "Duh of the Week" in the Chicago Sun-Times' sports section (example: "We really haven't had a lot of playoff success since '89," from a hockey player whose team hasn't won a playoff game since 1989). And when the Idaho Falls Post Register panned the movie "The Substitute," they wrote, "The principal (Ernie Hudson) drives a Lexus, wears $500 suits and a Rolex. Duh, I guess he's on the take!"
Then there's the Dallas Cowboys, an organization whose very existence the past couple of years has inspired reams of duhs to spew from reporters' laser printers. The game against Philadelphia in December in which Coach Barry Switzer ran the same play twice in a row on consecutive fourth downs inspired an unprecedented spate of duhspeak: "Cowboys' Biggest Problem is, Duh, Coach Barry Switzer" (Orlando Sentinel); "Then duh! Switzer tried for it again" (The Tennessean); "Huh? What? Duh?" (The Houston Chronicle).