Though we averted another outbreak of sawhorses, buckets and old dinette sets by the curb when the threatened fierce snowstorm turned into a dank drizzle Wednesday, ’tis still the season for “dibs” wars.
Are you for “dibs” or against “dibs”? Can those in favor of “dibs” live in peace with those opposed to “dibs”?
Good arguments can and will be had, but today I’m probing a more basic question about this ugly, maddening habit of saving on-street parking places with junk after a snowstorm:
Why “dibs”?
The expression has been in common use in Chicago in recent years. Yet for many years before that–more than 70, in fact–“dibs” has been the word that our children have used to stake claims to objects, privileges or opportunities they haven’t earned.
Dibs on the window seat! Dibs on the last piece of pizza! Dibs on the Metro section!
Yet the whole idea of parking dibs, say its proponents, is that you have earned your space–that your claim to a spot on a public street derives from the effort you put in to shovel it out.
The best analogy is not to grabby children, but to 19th Century American homesteaders who were able to “prove up” their ownership of 160 acre parcels of federal land by building a home on it and farming for five years.
What’s a “dib”?
In 1898, “Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable” said that dibs (or dibbs) meant “money,” and that the word comes from diobolus, a unit of currency in ancient Greece equal to a third of a drachma. A Newsweek article added that, in the early 1800s, “dib” was a slang term for “dollar.”
Various dictionary sources also note a connection between the word and a very old jacks-like game called “dibstones” in which the knuckle-bones of sheep were used as counters.
According to the Random House “Word of the Day” feature, the game “dibstones” probably took its name from the archaic verb “dib” meaning to “to pat or tap.” But “dibs” as we know it is more likely related to “dubs,” a shortened form of “double” that’s used in marbles “to claim two or more marbles knocked out of the ring by the same shot,” Random House said.
The Online Etymology Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary say that 1932 marks the first recorded use of “dibs” to express an otherwise unearned “claim or option on some object” and that it is an Americanism.
In meaning, it’s identical to “bagsy,” (sometimes “bagsie” or “bags”), a British slang term that appears in writing as far back as 1866. It seems to be etymologically related to the way small-game hunters claim and store their kill in bags, but no one is quite sure.
Evan Morris wrote in his “Word Detective” column that researchers “surveyed the playground rituals and protocols of more than 5,000 British schoolchildren just after World War II” for the book “The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren” and found:
“A child in Southern England who spots the one cookie left on the plate might exclaim `Bags it’ or `Baggsy,’ whereupon by the sacred code of children the prize is hers. Her London counterpart might say `Squits.’ Other words which seem to work as well include `Barley,’ `Bollars,’ `Jigs’ and, in Scotland, `Chaps’ or `Chucks.'”
Lexicographer Michael Quinion argued on his World Wide Words Web site that there is “a howling great gap where we might expect historical continuity” in the usage history of “dibs.”
“We have no idea how a word for a game in Britain turned into an American expression claiming priority,” Quinion wrote. He passed along a suggestion “that the word is a modified abbreviation of `division’ or `divide.'”
But of course “dibs” as practiced here in the winter is not about dividing or sharing. Even if we renamed it “car-steading,” it would still be about meeting your own needs and not concerning yourself with anyone else.
Either way it seems fitting that the name of this activity comes straight from the selfish rituals of childhood.
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