I’ve been on a rare movie binge in the last little while. About three weeks ago I caught Oppenheimer while I was in Auckland for a few days. Then, two weekends ago, my wife and I saw Barbie and the latest Mission Impossible back to back at our local movie theatre. Finally, my friend John and I caught Asteroid City last Friday.
The film that will stick most with me is Oppenheimer. But the film that wins hands down for being sheer, goofy fun is Barbie. What a joy it was!
I know some say Barbie is a two-hour long ad for a doll that’s caused more body-image problems for young girls than any other single thing on the planet. Of course they have a point, but I have a sense that if I had a young daughter I would still dearly love her to see the movie. I think she’d be left fully validated regarding any feelings she has about the world being tilted unfairly in boys’ (and men’s) favour, while at the same time being reassured that the world’s shittiness in no way reflects on her abilities or intrinsic worth.
Another positive about Barbie is that it got me thinking about the origins of this little word doll. It looked to me like something that probably came from the depths of Old English, with its earlier origins shrouded in mystery.
That assumption is yet another reason that I’m not an exalted linguist. Because it’s complete tosh.
Doll is actually an abbreviation of the girl’s name Dorothy, which came into English around 1400 from the Greek Dōrothéa, (dōron, “gift” and theós, “god” or “God's gift”).
There’s a rarely used male version of the name too, Dory. Theodore and Theodora are also derived from the same Greek root words as Dorothy, but in the reverse order.
If your parents named you Dorothy, there’s a good chance that you’re now called any one of Do, Dodi, Dodie, Doe, Doll, Dolley (or Dollie or Dolly), Dora, Dori, Dorie, Doro, Dory, Dot, Dottie, Dotty, Tea, or Thea. That makes Dorothy a prolific generator of diminutives, although Elizabeth, with 35 diminutives that I know of, is probably the champion - at least in English. And to save you the trouble of rushing off to Wikipedia, I can tell you now that Dolly Parton’s given name is actually Dolly, not Dorothy. That said, she may have been named after her mother’s younger sister, Dorothy Jo.
As a word (vs a name) doll has a chequered history. It was first used from the 1550s as endearing name for a female pet or a mistress. By the 1640s it had come to also mean “slattern”. It took until 1700 for the modern meaning of a type of child’s toy to arrive.
Then Raymond Chandler and film noir arrived in the 1940s and every second woman that a private investigator encountered was either a doll or a broad, with the distinction between the two being seemingly at the discretion of the PI. My own sense is that a doll was likely to be blonde, cute, possessed of a high pitched voice, and a bit scatterbrained, whereas a broad was probably dark haired, deeper voiced, a smoker and a drinker, and inherently dangerous (and, by that last attribute, also the one that the PI would fall hopelessly in love with despite being as hardboiled as a disappointed marine).
You might also be wondering how it is that the -r- in Dorothy became an -l- in doll. I don’t know, but I can tell you it happens regularly. Hal is short for Harold, Moll is a shortening of Mary, and Sally comes from Sarah. My guess is that the reason for the -l- is that it’s easier to say Hal than it is to say Har (etc), but I’m not staking my house on that.
Around 1900, a further sense of doll emerged thanks to the nascent film industry. A dolly is a platform on rails that carries a camera to record tracking shots. Why people chose that name for a mechanical device is anyone’s guess, but it’s far from the first time that such a thing has happened. Your car jack, the lazy susan on your dining table, and a jimmy (as in a crowbar) all came about because someone once decided that the device in question had a spooky resemblance to someone named Jack, Susan or Jimmy. Or something like that.
As for Barbie the movie character, she’s neither a doll nor a broad. She’s a delightfully flawed human being, without a mean bone in her body but capable of being hurtful without realising it. She’s certain enough of her place in the world to smack a man in the chops who dares fondle her backside, and smart enough to realise there’s a whole world that she’s yet to discover. And when she does discover it, she’s big enough to embrace it wholeheartedly.
If you’re one of the two or three people who haven’t yet seen Barbie, put on something pink and go see it. And see Oppenheimer too. One’s candy floss of the highest order, and the other’s serious food that you’ll remember for a long time.
That’s a pretty fine combo if you ask me.
Bits and specious
Raymond Chandler didn’t begin writing seriously until the age of forty four. In 1932 at the height of the Depression, he lost his job as an oil company executive and turned to writing detective novels.
Humphrey Bogart played Chandler’s detective Philip Marlowe in film adaptation of The Big Sleep. He also played detective Sam Spade, the invention of Dashiell Hammett, in The Maltese Falcon.
If a project gets the green light, has it been greenlit or greenlighted? Stan Carey has an answer.
Quote of the week
In writing a novel, when in doubt, have two guys come through the door with guns.
Raymond Chandler
I studied linguistics for a time and have long had an interest in etymologies. The letters/sounds l and r are allophones in some languages. In Korean, l and r are represented by as the same letter. I’m not here to do your job for you but I’m thinking l and r from “doll” and “Dorothy” are probably a result of the similarity in articulation (and the relationship between) of l and r.
And your analysis of Chandler’s distinction between dolls and broads follows the pattern of “the virgin and the whore” in literature. The blonde was usually represented as a woman of purity and chastity and good breeding and the brunette was often represented as a passionate harlot and vixen. James Fenimore Cooper’s female characters often followed this pattern in American literature from the early 1800s.
Damon Runyon referred to “Dolls” and the musical “Guys and Dolls” was based on his works. Runyon and Chandler were probably using the vernacular of the day.