A memeified frame from the 1975 film Monty Python and the Holy Grail depicting King Arthur and the knights of the Round Table skedaddling from the killer rabbit. The meme’s caption reads “Run away! Run Away!!”
10 November 2021
To skedaddle is to run away. The word rose to prominence in American slang during the US Civil War, but it probably has roots in English dialectal speech. Those roots, however, are not quite certain. Various Greek, Celtic, and Nordic etymologies have been proposed over the years, but with little to no evidence to support them.
Anatoly Liberman posits that it is a variant of the English dialect term scaddle—meaning wild, frisky, or to scare, frighten—with infix -da- added. And indeed, Francis Grose’s Provincial Glossary of 1787 has this entry:
Scaddle. That will not abide touching; spoken of young horses that fly out. In Kent, scaddle means thievish, rapacious. Dogs, apt to steal or snatch any thing that comes their way, are there said to be scaddle.
Liberman’s informed speculation is the most plausible explanation available. 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. So, this explanation is possible, but by no means certain.
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. 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. 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:
“Where did you find yourself after the ’splosion?”
“In a flat boat,” sez I.
“How far from the Frankling?” sez he.
“Why[”] sez I, “I never seed her, but as nigh as I can guess, about three hundred and seventy-five miles.”
“You’d oughter seen that gang skedaddle.”
And we get this note in Baltimore’s American and Commercial Advertiser of 21 October 1861, about fighting early in the war. The Baltimore paper says it is from the New York Post, but I have not found that earlier article:
“SKADADDLE.”—The Washington correspondent of one of the morning papers informs us that the German soldiers have christened the Rebel earthworks back of Munson’s Hill “Fort Skadaddle.”
For the benefit of future etymologists, who may have a dictionary to make out when the English language shall have adopted “skadaddle” into familiar use by the side of “employee” and “telegram,” we here define the new term.
It is at least an error of judgment, if not an intentional unkindness, to foist “skadaddle” on our Teutonic soldiers[.] The word is used throughout the whole army of the Potomac, and means “to cut slack,” “vamose the ranche,” “slope,” “cut your lucky,” or “clear out”—So that Fort Skadaddle is equivalent to the “Fort Runaway.”
A raft of uses of the term quickly follows, as the word gains traction throughout both armies. Of note, is this from San Francisco’s Steamer Bulletin of 11 September 1862 that uses skedaddle as a noun:
SPORT.—Gentlemen who live in Carson Valley state there are great quantities of trout in the river, returning to the sink from the mountain streams. Their skedaddle is caused by the falling of the stream and the fact that the season of incubation has passed. Persons living on the stream catch great numbers of them with the seine or hook, and literally feast on the luxury of fresh trout three times a day.
And by 1865 we get skedaddler, one who runs away, a coward. It appears in A New Pantomime by Irish writer Edward Kenealy. Green’s Dictionary of Slang mistakenly dates this to 1850, when the first version of the work was published, but it is not until the 1865 revised version that skedaddler appears in it. It’s in an exchange of insults, a sort of modern-day flyting:
Bow-legged Boozer, Ape, Apostate,
Chicken-hearted Maffler, Grub,
Numskull, Slanderer, base Skeadaddler,
Dare you thus a lady snub?
There we have it. Skedaddle rose to prominence during the US Civil War. It likely has its origins in English dialect, but we can’t be certain of that.
Sources:
The Agitator (Wellsboro, Pennsylvania), 12 January 1860, 1. NewspaperArchive.
American and Commercial Advertiser (Baltimore), 21 October 1861, 1. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.
Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2021, s.v. skedaddle, v.
Grose, Francis. A Provincial Glossary. London: S. Hooper, 1787. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
“Items from the Eastern Slope.” Steamer Bulletin (San Francisco), 11 September 1862, 3. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.
Kenealy, Edward Vaughan. A New Pantomime, New Edition. London: Reeves and Turner, 1865, 393. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Liberman, Anatoly. An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 2008, xliv, 186–89.
———. Word Origins ... and How We Know Them. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005, 68.
Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. skedaddle, v.
Wright, Joseph. The English Dialect Dictionary, vol. 5 of 6. Oxford: Henry Frowde, 1905, s.v. scaddle, adj. sb., and v., skedaddle, v., 231, 458.
Image credit: Python (Monty) Pictures, 1975, Monty Python and the Holy Grail (film), Terry Gilliam and Terry Jones, directors. Fair use of a single, low-resolution frame from the film to illustrate the topic under discussion.