24 August 2020
There are many slang euphemisms for the penis, and many of them go back centuries. The only surprising thing about dork is that it is relatively recent, only being recorded from the 1960s. The origin of dork is not known for certain, but it is probably a variation on dick. But while it is relatively new, the word developed in the same manner as many other slang terms for the male genitalia.
Dork is recorded in Jere Peacock’s 1961 novel Valhalla, but it is certainly older in oral use. The word appears in a conversation set in the early 1950s:
“Don’t start beatin’ your meat, lad,” the Negro said blandly. “We don’t allow that here.”
“Aww,” Butch said, “he couldn’t beat his meat. He ain’t got enough to beat.”
[...]
“You satisfy many women with that dorque?” the Negro asked in an unctuous voice. “Or you got to use your motherfucking hand all the time? Don’t look like you got enough to do much good with anything.”
The spelling dorque, which is not common elsewhere, hints that the term was new; either the spelling hadn’t yet standardized or Peacock had heard the term but not seen it in writing. But there is an earlier instantiation of the dorque spelling in a different sense. Louie the Dorque was a fictional U.S. Army soldier, and since Peacock’s novel is also about the military, albeit the Marines, it is possible that he was familiar with the character. The 9 February 1945 Stanford Daily has this:
Louie the Dorque nervously dealt the pasteboards [....] The situation wasn't helped when a pair of aces slipped from the Dorque's sleeve and rattled noisily on the board.
While it is possible that Peacock got his spelling from Louie the Dorque, the character is unlikely to be the source of the slang term in general.
Within a few years, dork is recorded as also having the meaning of a fool or pathetic person. From the Wisconsin State Journal of 17 January 1965:
The guy will return to Langdon st. if he is a “frat-rat,” or to one of the University Residence Halls if he is a “dorm-dork” or one who lives in a dormitory.
This shift in meaning is common for slang terms for the penis, many of eventually become general epithets for a person.
The sense of dork meaning a nerd comes a few decades later. From the pages of the National Lampoon of February 1984:
But where the sci-fi dorks could only stutter and drool at the comic-book conventions in inchoate rage, the intellectuals determined to rally to the Surfer's support.
Each of the noun senses also developed a verb sense to go along with them. To dork, meaning to have sexual intercourse, dates to at least 1970 and Ed Sanders’s counterculture novel Shards of God:
Many women, once dorked by the android, prayed to the Lord for even just thirty seconds more of the frenzied inner curlings and wrigglings of the clitorooter.
The sense to treat someone as a dork, that is badly, appears in 1969 in Hal Higdon’s book about management consultants, The Business Healers:
If any partner, for any reason, consciously or unconsciously dislikes a candidate, he can dork him [....] The job candidate will be thanked for his time but will not be asked to return.
And the sense to behave like a fool or a nerd, usually in the form to dork out, is in place by 1990 in Whitley Streiber’s Billy:
He was a nice guy, but he could dork out at a moment's notice. He had just dorked out.
Sources:
Bednarek, David. “UW Slang Makes ‘Smash’ a Kissing Success.” Wisconsin State Journal (Madison), 17 January 1965, 2. NewspaperArchive.com.
Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2020, s.v. dork, n., dork, adj., dork, v.
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2019, dork, n., dork, v.
Peacock, Jere. Valhalla. New York: Dell, 1967, 339. The Internet Archive.