Greetings Word-Friends! I have a treat for you today, one of the most famous animals of all time, indeed, so famous that it’s name is synonymous with the concept of death and indeed, total extinction. My friends, I present to you the Dodo.

The dodo’s scientific name is Raphus cucullatus and was a flightless bird that was endemic to the island of Mauritius. Now that, my friends is an island east of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean. Taxonomically the dodo is related to the pigeon, and since the 1600’s unfortunately no longer exists on planet earth as anything other than a pleasantly goofy, avian, memory.

The origin of the word ‘dodo’ is a little bit controversial. The name may be related to the Dutch word ‘dodaars’, a water bird known in English as the Little Grebe or Dabchick. Little Grebes resemble the dodo in feathers and in the fact that they are also clumsy walkers. The Dutch are known to have initially called the bird the ‘walgvogel’, literally meaning ‘ghastly bird’, in reference to the way it tasted. But adding to the mystery of where the dodo's name came from is the fact that ‘dodo’ had been part of the English language since at least 1628, and the Dutch are not thought to have reached Mauritius to discover this marvelously awkward bird before 1638. 

According to The Barnhart Concise Dictionary of Etymology, ‘dodo’ comes from Portuguese doudo (or more commonly ‘doido’) meaning ‘fool, simpleton, silly, stupid’, or, as an adjective, meaning ‘crazy.’ 

Yet another possibility, as author David Quammen noted in his book The Song of the Dodo, is "that 'dodo' was an onomatopoeic approximation of the bird's own call, a two-note pigeony sound like 'doo-doo'."

So while the origin of the word ‘dodo’ is lost in the mists of time it has none-the-less given us a wonderful metaphor for a person or organisation which is very old or has very old-fashioned views or is not willing to change and adapt. And if you want to sound very precocious and wish to use an adjective instead of a noun, you might say that such a person is ‘didine’.

Isn’t language wonderful?

Written by Taylor Davidson, Read by Zane C Weber

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