What’s the origin of the phrase ‘If I had my druthers’?
Outside the USA, few people know what druthers are.
This is an American phrase and not used widely elsewhere. People elsewhere in the world might want to know what druthers are. Druthers is a shortening of ‘would rathers’. The phrase originated in the late 19th century and is first cited in the January 1870 edition of Overland monthly and Out West magazine, in a story called Centrepole Bill, by George F. Emery:
“If I was a youngster, I ‘drather set up in any perfession but a circus-driver, but a man can’t always have his ‘drathers.”
Druthers, as opposed to its earlier variant drathers, is traced back to 1876 in Dialect Notes:
_“_Bein’s I caint have my druthers an’ set still, I cal’late I’d better pearten up an’ go ‘long.”