This being my 100th Grammar Dance article, I thought I’d make it a doozy–that is, I thought I might track down the origins of the word, “doozy.”
I first heard it watching American cartoons in the 1960s. Just before Bugs Bunny’s antagonist falls off a cliff, into a mine or down an elevator shaft, Bugs would often offer the faux-kindly advice, “The first step’s a doozy!” As a child, I contextualized it to mean an extreme version of whatever category “the doozy” occupied, and accepted it on its face.
The word’s archaic charm kept it in my unquestioned active vocabulary for decades, and I sometimes employed it when I wished to invoke a mood of waxed-mustache anachronism for an impressive person, place or thing. When I finally took it upon myself to find out about the word's history, I was a little disappointed. I imagined its source being its onomatopoeic resemblance to someone falling, Bugs Bunny-style, down a well or a conflation of "ooh" and "huzzah." Alas, no.
“Doozy” is probably the result of the gradual evolution of the word, “daisy,” which in the late 19th century was a common metaphor for any exemplary thing. “Doozy” begins to emerge in the earliest part of the 20th century as a comic replacement where “daisy” might have been used before.
There is also a theory that the word derives from popular Italian actress Eleonora Duse, who lived at the turn of the century. Credible or not, this is the etymology I prefer to believe, as she was one of the great stage artists of her time and was known for tackling deeply challenging material.
There is also a theory that it derives from the Duesenberg automobile, whose legendary luxury is tempting to associate with “doozy,” but its usage predates the car company’s widest popularity, so that is unlikely.
Most signs point to the mundane transition of “daisy” into “doozy” over the course of the 19th century’s departure and the arrival of the 20th, likely at the hands of a series of grinning, bow-tied goobers seeing their first steamship or a nicely carved walking stick.
That’s where most of the evidence lies, but as is the case with beliefs of such low stakes as these, strongly holding to them even in error bears little consequence. So, in furtherance of the arts and in furtherance of the feminine, I am throwing in all the way with the Eleonora Duse theory, as wrong as I surely am.
