Onomatopöie (W3)
(E?)(L?) http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onomatopöie(E1)(L1) http://www.wordsmith.org/awad/
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Well, there is always the outside chance that we are talking about the flower name that comes from the Old English "daegesege". It's more likely, though, that the "daisy" in "upsy-daisy" comes from "(lack)aday" with the adjectival suffix "-sy" tacked on. The documentation is weak, but variants in several dialects point to this possibility and it makes good semantic sense.
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So, "upsy-daisy" means "up" to almost everyone, and "whoopsy-daisy" means "down" (falling or dropping), but there is a gray area surrounding "oopsy-daisy."
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There are lots of forms of this expression: "upsidaisy", "upsa-daisy", "upsy-daisy", and "oops-a-daisy", variously hyphenated on the rare occasions they turn up in print.
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Its history is closely bound up with "lackadaisical", which started out as the cry "alack-a-day!" = "shame or reproach to the day!" (that it should have brought this upon me), but which by the eighteenth century had turned into "lackadaisy".
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February 01, 2016 05:10 UTC
Everyday Grammar TV
Everyday Grammar: Onomatopoeia
Published 01/31/2016
Learn more with Everyday Grammar: Pow! Whizz! What Are Onomatopoeia? in Level Three