By Betty Kirkpatrick
What is most likely to make you go your dinger? No, this is not a rude question, and I certainly do not want any rude answers. In Scots, to go your dinger – the first syllable of which rhymes with ring – is to become extremely angry. This does not relate to just any old anger, certainly not to the kind of anger that leaves you silently fuming in the corner.
No, if you go your dinger you give maximum vent to your anger, going on and on about the cause of your anger in a most vocal way. For example, you will frequently find parents going their dinger when their offspring have transgressed in some way. You can also still find some people going their dinger about things that upset them in the correspondence columns of newspapers
Go your dinger is not necessarily connected with rage. It can also be used to mean to do something very actively and enthusiastically. At a party you might refer to young people still going their dinger on the dance floor when older and less energetic mortals have long crept home to their beds. Or you might refer to the band at the same party going their dinger as they play their various musical instruments with great gusto.
Dinger is a relatively recent word, but it has its origins in a much older word. It is derived from the verb ding, meaning to beat or strike. This was in use in the 14th century and is thought to be derived from Old Norse dengja, to beat, thrash or hammer. Ding went on to acquire other meanings such as knock, push, shove or drive.
Once, if you dinged oot someone, you replaced them in another person’s affections. In modern parlance you would be the cause of someone being dumped. If you dinged yirsel, you let something vex or annoy you (presumably before going your dinger).
Should you try to ding information into someone, you try hard and persistently to get it into their thick head. If a blow to the head dings you donnart, it makes you mentally confused. Talking of blows to the head, ding can also act as a noun meaning a blow, knock, push or nudge.
The verb ding can also mean to defeat, beat, get the better of, wear out or tire out. It is to be found in the exclamation that dings dinty! – meaning that beats everything, that is the absolute limit, or words to that effect. Some of you may be familiar with the saying facts are chiels (young men, fellows) that winna ding, a quotation from Robert Burns’s poem A Dream, meaning that facts cannot be denied. Of course, many politicians, and others, have tried to disprove this saying.
Ding also has associations with the weather. When used of rain, snow or hail it means to fall heavily and continuously. A ding-on was a heavy fall of any of these, but the syllables were reversed and became onding, now the usual term. There’s nothing like a relentless series of ondings to get the populace going their dingers about the climate.
Betty Kirkpatrick is the former editor of several classic reference books, including Chambers Twentieth Century Dictionary and Roget’s Thesaurus. She is also the author of several smaller language reference books, including The Usual Suspects and Other Clichés published by Bloomsbury, and a series of Scots titles, including Scottish Words and Phrases, Scottish Quotations, and Great Scots, published by Crombie Jardine.
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