doddard
Language: English
Part of speech: noun
Forms: form: doddards
Etymology: Possibly from dodder (“to shake or tremble as one moves, especially as of old age”) + -ard. The Scottish National Dictionary, a Scots dictionary, defining doddard as “A foolish old man, a dotard”, and providing an 1823 quotation, gives the etymology as either a variant of dotard, comparing Early Modern English dodart, or perhaps related to doddered, with spelling influenced by dotard.
Senses: examples: text: You are too old and too exacting to be satisfied with a blank page. You would certainly prefer one upon which life has written something. It is more interesting. Young girls are only for youths and for certain brainless doddards.
ref: 1934, Sigurd Christiansen, translated by Isaac Anderson, “The Storm”, in Chaff Before the Wind, New York, N.Y.: Liveright Publishing Corporation, page 266:
text: President Roosevelt and the former King Edward collect stamps, along with thousands of others, ranging from six-year-olds to ninety-seven year old^([sic]) doddards.
ref: 1937 March 25, B. C. Hagglund, “[Views and Reviews] The Collective Instinct”, in Tri-County Forum, volume V, number 51, Thief River Falls, Minn., page two, column 5:
text: Nelly. There are some people who enjoy Sunday. / Renny. Yes . . . the old doddards who listen to military bands in the public park.
ref: 1939, Jean Sarment, translated by Frances Keene and Adrienne Foulke, “Rude Awakening”, in Eisig Silberschlag, Frederick Lehner, editors, Poet Lore: A Quarterly of World Literature, volume XLV, numbers 3–4, Boston, Mass., page 257:
text: Comments John Garth, critic of the San Francisco Argonaut: “When the young student leaves art school and starts his career as a producing artist, his utter contempt for those moss-backed old doddards, the Old Masters, is complete and vocal. After ten years of the heat of the struggle, he stands silent before the Old Masters and removes his hat.”
ref: 1942 October 1, The Art Digest, volume XVII, number 1, New York, N.Y.: The Art Digest, Inc., page 6, column 3:
text: Secondly, the members of the Oporto Junta were no better than inept doddards, none of whom possessed any personal prestige.
ref: 1947, Marcus Cheke, chapter XXVII, in Carlota Joaquina, Queen of Portugal, Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, published 1969, →ISBN, page 190:
text: The doctor is interested only in getting the three old doddards out of their ruts, and that is accomplished not by Freud but by cops and robbers, romance, and sentimental complications out of Scribe and Pinero.
ref: 1955, W[ieder] David Sievers, Freud on Broadway: A History of Psychoanalysis and the American Drama, New York, N.Y.: Cooper Square Publishers, Inc., published 1970, →ISBN, page 57:
text: Pound challenged one poet to a duel because he was “stupid,” as he attacked the “elderly muttonheads” and the Victorian “doddards” much in the manner of Mencken, his friend, at home.
ref: 1955, Van Wyck Brooks, The Confident Years: 1885-1915 (Everyman’s Library), New York, N.Y.: E. P. Dutton and Company, Inc.; London: J. M. Dent and Sons, Limited, →LCCN, page 511:
text: Publishers, he has been told, are literary brigands, lying in wait for talented but defenseless authors, ready to rob them of their ideas. Those who aren’t brigands are doddards who have no real taste or appreciation and don’t know a good thing then they see it and unless you know someone who knows someone who knows the publisher it is impossible even to get a reading of your manuscript.
ref: 1961, “Thomas R. Coward”, in Gerald Gross, editor, Publishers on Publishing, London: Secker & Warburg, published 1962, page 148:
text: So it is not surprising that her joint was raided while she was revealed in an attitude most indicative of her general attitude (“action fotos” were taken by the go-getter chief of local police, who organized the raid), as she was, like a real trouper, trying indefatigably to ascertain the precise wishes of a party of old roués and impotent old doddards . . . then she was caught and she swore like a real trooper.
ref: 1968, Jon Horn, Bondage Trash, New York, N.Y.: The Olympia Book Society, page 79:
text: Flaccid adrenals urged near-moribund hearts to beat faster. They flayed their ponies with the shafts of their spears. Drool flecked the lips of doddards and ponies alike. Their backbrains smelled blood and fire in the air.
ref: 1969 July, Norman Spinrad, “The Last Hurrah of the Golden Horde”, in New Worlds, number 192, London: New Worlds Publishing, page 26, column 1:
text: Furthermore, reaction and tension between adults and the younger folk is nothing new. In Faust, a student rants, / While half the world beneath our yoke is brought. What have you doddards done? Nothing thought, dreamed, and considered drafting plan on plan!
ref: 1972, Edward M. Scott, “Overview”, in The Adolescent Gap: Research Findings on Drug Using and Non-Drug Using Teens, Springfield, Ill.: Charles C Thomas, →ISBN, pages 3–4:
text: Wood’s comment, when he first learned of the March plan, is interesting. “We have a lot of doddards toddling into the military situation now. The General Staff which is such only in name is quoted in last night’s paper as being opposed to universal service and training and recommending a standing army of 500,000 men. These are on a par with the group of microcephaloids, who twice sent me when I was Chief of Staff, a unanimous recommendation from the War College in favor of a bounty system as against universal service.” Wood to Theodore Roosevelt, December 12, 1918, Wood MSS.
ref: 1972, John Garry Clifford, The Citizen Soldiers: The Plattsburg Training Camp Movement, 1913–1920, Lexington, Ky.: The University Press of Kentucky, →ISBN, page 272:
text: “I’ll tell you the trouble. Our army is commanded by doddards left over from the Revolution, and the spirit of ’76 is not only dead but decayed. Military tactics change like everything else, and old men lose their vigor and perception and incentive. Worse still, their courage.”
ref: 1977, Patricia Gallagher, Mystic Rose, New York, N.Y.: Avon, →ISBN, page 125:
text: He would have no choice, it seemed, but to saunter around the house or join the other doddards who with the aid of walking-sticks tottered along the length of Cheyne Walk.
ref: 1978, Phyllis Hastings, The Feast of the Peacock, London: Corgi Books, Transworld, published 1980, →ISBN, page 148:
text: The statement that influenza rages in England does not imply that the disease is not rampant elsewhere. The Mercure de France for March 16 brings evidence that Paris is as much plagued by doddards as we are.
ref: 1980, “Art Notes”, in Harriet Zinnes, editor, Ezra Pound and the Visual Arts, New York, N.Y.: New Directions Publishing, →ISBN, page 109:
text: Penny whist, the game of shabby genteel dowagers and doddards.
ref: 1984, Elizabeth Hewitt, Captain Black, New York, N.Y.: Signet, New American Library, →ISBN, page 57:
text: There are men of all ages and all types, from wild-eyed adolescents to crinkled doddards.
ref: 1987, Vivian Elliot, editor, Dear Mr Shaw: Selections from Bernard Shaw’s Postbag, London: Bloomsbury Publishing, →ISBN, page 309:
text: Too, they were men like him, younger and more vigorous than the doddards who served on Heraclius’ staff.
ref: 2000, Thomas Harlan, The Gate of Fire (The Oath of Empire; 2), New York, N.Y.: w; Tor Books, →ISBN, page 475:
text: He was starting to lose patience with the old doddards at the Foreign Office, too, and beginning to think he was wasting his time on them.
ref: 2004, Sylvia Andrew, A Very Unusual Governess, Richmond: Mills & Boon, →ISBN, page 72:
text: “That’s for the Directory. All sound and no presence. Those doddards couldn’t muster an Imperial Host if Hypat itself had barbarians climbing the First Walls.”
ref: 2006, E. E. Knight [pseudonym; Eric Frisch], Dragon Avenger (Age of Fire; 2), New York, N.Y.: Roc, →ISBN, page 164:
text: All over Western Europe, wherever the School’s influence was felt, men and women nonetheless continued to turn into puckered, rheumy old doddards, just as they’d always done, sinking at an alarmingly early age into smelly decrepitude before toppling gnarled and half-blind into their graves, often with a hefty push from the younger members of their families.
ref: 2008, Robert Dessaix, Arabesques: A Tale of Double Lives, Syndey, N.S.W.: Picador, published 2009, →ISBN, page 261:
text: The creative faculty may, and often does, outlast the critical. On the whole, about all an old critic can do, if he is to stay in the ring, is to use himself and his position as a megaphone for some younger man’s ideas, a course where his conceit usually prevents and forestals him. A few doddards should, of course, be preserved, to run wode when the wind blows; to act as a sort of barometer for the energy of new work.
ref: 2010, Robert Scholes, Clifford Wulfman, Modernism in the Magazines: An Introduction, New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, →ISBN, page 315:
text: What I’m trying to say is that she could be delightful when she wanted to be. Here, she had no reason to extend herself for what she called ‘a bunch of old doddards.’
ref: 2012, E. B. Boatner, M-o-t-h-e-r Spells Murder, Bloomington, Ind.: iUniverse, →ISBN, page 20:
text: Male characters showing up as young heroes-in-the-making or sage old doddards, and female characters being maidens, matrons or crones?
ref: 2018, Neil Foster MacPhail, Beowulf and Other Tales, [Morrisville, N.C.]: [Lulu.com], →ISBN, page 241:
text: I shall replenish it with Roman blood. / Who here has sworn, and then failed to keep his oath? Simeon of Corinth. Who has cringed unto the dust and let fall the sword from his hand? You, brethren. And at this moment, in the city, nothing more is needed for Caesar and the city’s gods to perish than the resurrection of the saints. Ha! Leave the old doddards among the graves! With me, now!
ref: 2018, Zygmunt Krasiński, translated by Charles S. Kraszewski, Dramatic Works, London: Glagoslav Publications, →ISBN:
text: These are not imperial soldiers. These are ship guards, trained in directing doddards to the latrines and dealing with drunk noblemen, not killing.
ref: 2023, Brent Weeks, “The Time and Place for Honor”, in Night Angel Nemesis (The Kylar Chronicles), New York, N.Y.: Orbit, →ISBN:
glosses: A frail old man.
Related terms: dotard