Like, duh

I occasionally offer a non-political post on the weekends. What follows is piffle.

Anachronistic slang in period films bothers me. Even a piece of fluff like Shanghai Noon -- a western comedy starring Jackie Chan and Owen Wilson -- loses me whenever Wilson spews the kind of dialog one might expect from a '90s valley dude. His line "You've lost your 'winging it' privileges" caused at least one audience member to leave the film mentally, in order to ponder whether a cowboy would ever use the phrase winging it.

Possibly yes; probably no. "Winging it" first saw print in the 1930s, although the term appears to have been used in the late 19th century by actors who had to learn their lines rapidly, while waiting in the wings.

The problem is that we lack a handy reference book designed to pinpoint the year in which a turn of speech entered common parlance. The OED addresses the issue of word origins, but few consider that multi-volume dictionary handy, and it does not concentrate on slang. Flexner's Listening to America is, I believe, out of print.

All of which brings me to the duh problem.

A number of films set in the 1970s, 60s and 50s feature characters who use the exclamation "Like, duh!" as a shorthand way of saying "Isn't it obvious?" Young people seem to be under the impression that the phrase has been in use for generations.

To the contrary. When I was a tyke, back in the 1960s, no-one said "Duh!" sarcastically.

My best guess is that Duh traces back to John Steinbeck's book Of Mice and Men, which inspired one of the many fine films released in 1939. That movie, in turn, gave rise to a number of Warner Brothers cartoons featuring characters based on Steinbeck's immortal Lenny and George.

The big stupid guy was Lenny. In one of the cartoons, he nearly dies because he has forgotten how to breathe. The animated version of Lenny would preface many statements with a long, drawn-out "Duh" -- as in: "Duhhhh, I done a bad thing, George!" "Duhhhh, tell me about the rabbits again, George!"

The cartoons saw heavy television rotation in the 1960s and '70s, thereby imprinting Lenny's dopey speech mannerisms into the consciousness of nearly everyone who grew up in that period. (We should have learned about those characters directly from Steinbeck, but reading had fallen out of fashion.) Thus, if a kid at school said something foolish, his companions might mock him by repeating his words while "doing" Lenny -- and by prefacing the statement with a long, Lenny-esque "Duhhhhh...."

At least, that was the situation in the high school I attended in the mid 1970s. Around 1980, this form of mockery morphed into a sharp, clipped "Duh!" often accompanied by the inevitable "like." Like, duh.

When did "like" become inevitable? People probably began using "like" as a slang way of saying "in the fashion of" in the 19th century, perhaps earlier: "I was walking down the street all innocent-like."

As I like remember it, the term did not see continual use as a verbal crutch until like the 1970s. We had to wait until like the 1980s to hear like a high school kid say something like:

"So I like go to the concert and there's this like guy who's all like Rastafarian, and I'm like, 'Hello? This isn't like Reggae...'"

When did like and all become slang replacements for the verb to say? My memory may be tricking me, but I believe that like was used in the fashion in mid-1970s, while all began to be used a decade later. We had to wait until 1985 or thereabouts to hear a locution of this kind:

"I'm like, 'Don't do that shit,' and he's all, 'I'll do whatever shit I want.'"

At some point in the 20th century, Americans decided to define the phrases he said and she said in terms of exact quotation. For inexact quotation, people substituted the verb to go for to say:

"So he goes, 'I'm not joining no Army."

I wonder when this usage of go began? The early 1900s, I would guess, although I am far from sure. At any rate, only older people go in this fashion nowadays. The young use like and all.

Is it possible that my suggested slang chronologies are incorrect? Duh! That's why I'm all, "We need like a reference book." And like if you folks want to correct my memories, I'm all like, "Go for it."

Do people still say "Go for it?"