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Get your dander up

Posted by ESC on June 10, 2000

In Reply to: Get one's dander up. posted by Andy Sabl on June 09, 2000

: Does anyone know where this comes from? Dictionaries tell me that "dander" is a corruption of dandruff, but this doesn't help much since I don't think people's dandruff gets worse when they're angry.

: Just wondering..

: Andy.

GET YOUR DANDER UP - "Many of the early Yankee humorists - Seba Smith, Charles Davis, Thomas Haliburton - used this Americanism for 'to get angry,' and it is found in the 'Life of Davy Crockett.' It is one of those expressions with a handful of plausible explanations. The most amusing is that the dander in the phrase is an English dialect form of 'dandruff' that was used in the Victorian era; someone with his dander up, according to this theory, would be wrathfully tearing up his hair by the fistful, dandruff flying in the process. Another likely source is the West Indian 'dander,' for a ferment used in the preparation of molasses, which would suggest a rising ferment of anger. The Dutch 'donder,' 'thunder,' has also been nominated, for it is used in the Dutch phrase 'op donderon, 'to burst into a sudden rage,' And then there is the farfetched theory that 'dander' is a telescoped form of 'damned anger.' And if these aren't enough, we have the possibility that 'dander' comes from an English dialect word for 'anger,'; from the Scots 'danders,' for 'hot embers'; and from the Romany 'dander, 'to bite.'" From Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins by Robert Hendrickson (Facts on File, New York, 1997).

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