toodle-something
credit: twistynoodle Fifteen years! That's how long this blog has been going. Happy anniversary to me! And thank you all coming along with me on this. I've just decided, since I really should be going to bed, that a 15th anniversary calls for a blog post, so I thought I'd share with you something I learned today while searching for 20th-century interjections in the Oxford English Dictionary (as one does). My first surprise was to discover that the leave-taking expression Toodles! is the same age as me. (Which is to say, the OED's first example of its use is from 1965.) But my second surprise was to discover that it's an AmE expression—the first example was from an episode of Gidget , the all-American Sally-Field-on-a-surfboard sitcom. This was a surprise to me for two reasons: (1) the expression it abbreviates, toodle-oo , is British in origin. The first OED citation is from the magazine Punch in 1907, followed by lots of citations in British Literature (T. E....