ShopQuiz
April 11, 2009 by The Judge
Filed under Words and Phrases
The story goes that in 1780 a Mr. Daly, the manager of a Dublin theatre, wagered that he could introduce a new word of no meaning into the language in twenty-four hours.
All around the city, he chalked the letters QUIZ up on walls and doors and all the people of Dublin were asking what the word meant.
Mr. Daly won his bet and ‘quiz’ became part of the language.
Among its now obsolete meanings are ‘a practical joke or hoax’ and ‘a puzzling or eccentric person’.
These seem to fit with the legend of Mr. Daly.
A monocular eyeglass with, or without, a handle was called a quizzing glass and the term quiz was used to refer to any odd or ridiculous person.
These days of course, the word more commonly refers to a test, usually a competition of knowledge, or a verb meaning to interrogate.
You say the ’story goes that in 1780 a Mr Daly…’and I would like to know your source, because the Oxford Word and Language Service (OWLS) gives different details.
They say that ‘the most detailed account gives the date as 21st August 1791 and the word itself was recorded nine years earlier’. The first recorded usage was in 1782 which would fit with your date, but where did you get that date. Oxford places no credence on the anecdote and says it is a fanciful coinage.
I found this story in the Irish Times newspaper last year, but I have found that there are a few different sources for this story, some say 1780 and some say 1791.
The website http://www.askoxford.com has this to say:
This picturesque tale appeared as an anecdote in 1836, but the most detailed account (in F. T. Porter’s Gleanings and Reminiscences, 1875) gives the date of the exploit as 1791. The word, however, was already in use by then, meaning ‘an odd or eccentric person’, and had been used in this sense by Fanny Burney in her diary on 24 June 1782. ‘
Obviously the details have been lost in the mists of time, so we will probably never know the truth.
Happy Puzzling!