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The term 'Dipsy doodle' did not originate in sports. It was, I believe, the name of a dance and/or the title of a popular song of the 1930's.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Welcome aBoard, willhoff. I'm wondering if it's possible the Great Anu made a mistake? Another member here posted in 'Miscellany' that it's a 1937 Tommy Dorsey tune.
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Carpal Tunnel
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W3 has the baseball sense as no. 3, but "origin unknown"
1. a bewildering plunge and lag by turns [in economics] 2. artfully deceptive or shady manipulation [in politics] 3. a very slow curve on a pitched ball in baseball
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Carpal Tunnel
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Dear willhoff: I owe you a humble apology for having made a post in Miscellany about your topic, having failed to check this location first. I have sent you a PM with more detail. Bill Hunt
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The suggestion was made by Keiva in the Misc. thread that this sounds like a Dizzy Dean expression. I can also easily imagine it coming from Satchel Paige. He also opines that the expression could have gone either way, from the song/dance to sports or vice versa. Since the possibilities are so close chronologically further research is needed to pin it down one way or the other. I respectfully submit that hearsay evidence is unreliable, even if from people alive at the time. Someone may have noticed it first in a secondary context and have assumed it to be the primary source.
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> I respectfully submit that hearsay evidence is unreliable...
as another example, I would have bet dollars to doits that hat trick originated in ice hockey, from the tradition of spectators throwing their headgear on the ice upon the incidence of a player scoring his third goal of a game. then there is the octopus trick used in Detroit...
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Carpal Tunnel
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tsuwm would have bet dollars to doits that hat trick originated in ice hockey
This is just a specific example of a general phenomenon. We go through our lives blithely not noticing something or other and then it springs up all around us. I don't think that I got everybody started driving red cars just because I started noticing all the red cars on the road after I got mine.
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tsuwm has to be kidding. Ice hockey began comparatively recently.Cricket is so much older that its being the source of the phrase "hat trick" seems far more probable.
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I looked it up in Quinion:
It comes from the English game of cricket and refers to a bowler who takes three wickets with three successive balls. For those more familiar with baseball, this is an impressive achievement, similar to a baseball pitcher striking out three batters in a row, but much less common. It seems to have been the custom in the nineteenth century for such a paragon of the art to be awarded a new hat by his club as a mark of his success. However, it is sometimes also said that the phrase alludes to a distinctly more plebeian reward in which the bowler was permitted to take his hat around the crowd for a collection (not necessarily a bowler hat, of course: that was named after a couple of completely different chaps, Messrs Thomas and William Bowler, hatmakers). Hat trick was first recorded in print in the 1870s, but has since been widened to apply to any sport in which the person competing carries off some feat three times in quick succession, such as scoring three goals in one game of soccer.
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