Origins
The origin of the term is obscure, and many theories have been proposed. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) dates the first recorded use of dike, dyke in 1942, in Berrey and Van den Bark's American Thesaurus of Slang. In his review of a short-lived 1930 Broadway play, Robert Benchley says
…is confronted with several engineering problems which he solves by mistake. There’s your story. Interlard it with every known crack which has been made along Broadway for the past two years (and several which haven’t, chief among them being: "Did you employ dikes in building the Barge Canal?" "No, we just had a gang of Italians." This I consider top for the evening.) and there you have “So Was Napoleon.”
The term bulldyker, from which dyke may have been shortened, first appeared in 1920s novels connected with the Harlem Renaissance. For example, in the 1928 novel Home to Harlem, Claude McKay wrote: " what we calls bulldyker in Harlem. ... I don't understan' ... a bulldyking woman." (The term is unattested in the OED.) From the context in the novel, the word was considered crude and pejorative at the time.
Several theories have been proposed for the origin of bulldyker. One is that it was an abbreviation of morphadike, a dialect variant of hermaphrodite, commonly used for homosexuals in the early twentieth century. This in turn may be related to the late-19th-century slang use of dyke (meaning ditch) for the vulva. Bull is also a common expression for "masculine" and "aggressive" (as in bullish), and bulldyke implied a "masculine woman". Another theory claims that bulldyker was a term used for bulls who were used to impregnate cows. The word stud was extended for a sexually promiscuous man and a man successful with women. The terms bulldyker and bulldagger were also taken from their original context and used for the same purpose. A man who was a great lover was called a bulldyker. Bulldyking woman and bulldyker became terms for women who resembled a bulldyker, a male stud, and who were assumed to perform the role.
In Another Mother Tongue, Judy Grahn proposed the word bulldyke may have arisen from the name of the Celtic queen Boadicea.
Read more about this topic: Dyke (slang)
Famous quotes containing the word origins:
“Compare the history of the novel to that of rock ‘n’ roll. Both started out a minority taste, became a mass taste, and then splintered into several subgenres. Both have been the typical cultural expressions of classes and epochs. Both started out aggressively fighting for their share of attention, novels attacking the drama, the tract, and the poem, rock attacking jazz and pop and rolling over classical music.”
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