The Baltimore paper says it is from the New York Post, but I have not found that earlier article: “You’d oughter seen that gang skedaddle.”Īnd we get this note in Baltimore’s American and Commercial Advertiser of 21 October 1861, about fighting early in the war. “Why sez I, “I never seed her, but as nigh as I can guess, about three hundred and seventy-five miles.” “Where did you find yourself after the ’splosion?” Mistakenly thinking that he was on the boat, the townspeople are solicitous and go out of their way to make sure he is well and has all that he needs: It appears in a humorous story about a traveler who arrives in a town shortly after a steamboat, the Franklin, suffered a boiler explosion with many casualities.
The earliest recorded use of skedaddle is in the Wellsboro Pennsylvania newspaper The Agitator on 12 January 1860, shortly before the outbreak of the Civil War. So, this explanation is possible, but by no means certain. Wright’s English Dialect Dictionary of 1906 has entries for both scaddle and for skedaddle, but provides no citations for the latter that predate American use of the term. Liberman’s informed speculation is the most plausible explanation available. Dogs, apt to steal or snatch any thing that comes their way, are there said to be scaddle. In Kent, scaddle means thievish, rapacious. That will not abide touching spoken of young horses that fly out. And indeed, Francis Grose’s Provincial Glossary of 1787 has this entry: Various Greek, Celtic, and Nordic etymologies have been proposed over the years, but with little to no evidence to support them.Īnatoly Liberman posits that it is a variant of the English dialect term scaddle-meaning wild, frisky, or to scare, frighten-with infix - da- added. Those roots, however, are not quite certain. The word rose to prominence in American slang during the US Civil War, but it probably has roots in English dialectal speech.
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