In talking to somebody about this tonight, there are plenty of parallel constructions in English to the heebie-jeebies discussed below, where you have or give somebody the shivers, the giggles, etc.So, you should be able to talk about a single heebie-jeebie. But some don't work that way for me -- the jitters, where a jitter works in a technical sense, but not in this sense. The creeps is only plural as far as I can figure, though Merriam-Webster says "usually in the plural".
So, now, I just gotta know: Is there a willy behind the willies? M-W lists it as 1896, origin unknown.
10 comments:
Isn't 'jitter' a mass rather than count noun?
George Carlin has a bit about miscellaneous ailments: "the blahs, the hots, the runs, the creeps, the willies, the shits, the vapors, the bends, the heebie-jeebies..."
Hey, and what about the screaming meemies? Those were all the rage in the '20s, hot on the heels of the heebie-jeebies. And then there's the UK variant, the screaming (h)abdabs.
OK, this is just spooky -- I guess your answer gives me the creeps, the vapors and the willies. It's just that you anticipated what I was thinking. First, I almost didn't post because I couldn't quite recall the right form of the 'screaming meemies'.
Second, the hook on wanting that was precisely the dating: A lot of this stuff was fin de siecle or early 20th century. And I couldn't quite nail it down.
Bonus: the Carlin thing is slick ... I must have known that back in the day.
BTW, the first cite in OED (and presumably M-W) is from Dialect Notes, 1896. The issue is on Google Books -- and, saints be praised, it's available in full view like it ought to be. The expression appears on a word list (attested from Ithaca, NY), but with no explanation of its origin. One theory I've seen is that it comes from willy-nilly, which seems vaguely plausible.
My mother always used 'screamy-meamy' in the singular...
If Ben Zimmer finds a notion plausible, I won't quibble, but I would never have thought of willy-nilly here.
I suppose this word is not going to lead to any competitive antedating, though. That's a shame.
Grant Barrett recently posted a citation for another variant of "heebie-jeebies" on his Double-Tongued site: "ibby-jibbies."
Richard Larson remarked to me that the required plurality in these kinds of words is a regular feature of disease names... measles, mumps, shakes, cooties, etc.
Cases like these were some of the central examples in a 2001 LI squib of Norvin Richards about abstract 'Have' hiding inside 'give' and 'get': "john gave me the willies/I got the willies/I have the willies", an idea of which I am inordinately fond. :)
Nice, thanks! One of the intriguing questions about a little pattern (construction?) like this is where it comes from: How and where did it start, how and why did it spread as it has?
I'll check into that and post on it, if I can.
I came across a wonderful early example of this type of plural affliction: "mubble-fubbles," defined by the OED as "a state of depression or melancholy; despondency, low spirits." That dates all the way back to 1589. Interestingly, it appeared chiefly as "in one's mubble-fubbles," so it's a bit different from the "have/get the Xs" frame. But by the mid-18th century people were already having/getting "the blues" (or more fully "the blue devils").
Nowadays there are all sorts of ad-hoc Xs one can have/get. I'm reminded of the annoying temp in Office Space: "Uh-oh. Sounds like somebody's got a case of the Mondays."
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