Dodd-man?

This is an excerpt from a World Wide Words, newsletter I get every week about words and such.

Hodmandod

A traditional English riddle runs

Though not a cow I have horns;
Though not an ass I carry a pack-saddle;
And wherever I go I leave silver behind me.

The answer, in a curious little southern English dialect word, sadly long since defunct, is hodmandod — in everyday language, a snail.

Before a snail was a hodmandod, it was a dodman, whose origin is puzzling, but may be related to the rare word dod for a rounded, bare hilltop; this comes from the Middle English dodden, to make the top of something bare, an activity you will agree definitely needs its own verb. The snail’s shell might have been fancifully compared to a bare hilltop. Dodman became extended through what Malcolm Jones described in Dialect in Wiltshire as a “childish, part-rhyming reduplication” to make hoddy-doddy and hodmandod. But dodman has outlived its extended relative and is still to be found in Norfolk dialect.

The earliest example of hodmandod on record is in a work by the famously arrogant and pedantic Elizabethan lawyer and writer Gabriel Harvey. When he moved to London from his home town of Saffron Walden (where saffron was once widely cultivated), he managed to get involved in an interminable series of controversial exchanges with some of the best pamphleteers of his time, including John Lyly and Thomas Nashe. Gabriel Harvey responded to a scornful putdown of his brother Thomas by Nashe, describing the latter in crude insults as

... the son of a mule, a raw grammarian, a brabbling sophister, a counterfeit crank, a stale rake-hell, a piperly rimer, a stump-worn railer, a dodkin author, whose two swords are like the horns of a hodmandod; whose courage [is] like the fury of a gad-bee; and whose surmounting bravery, like the wings of a butterfly.
Pierce’s Supererogation, or a New Praise of the Old Ass, by Gabriel Harvey, 1593. The spelling is modernised, but not the vocabulary; brabbling meant hair-splitting.

Somehow, perhaps through a mental association with a hunchback, the word also came to mean a deformed person:

His head was thrice broader than his body, which fortunate accident had made such a hodmandod one of the greatest philosophers of this age; but it had also given the appearance of one of those rude and grotesque figures which German wit carves out for a humorous pair of nutcrackers.
The Spirit of the Public Journals, 1807.

Some writers have confused dodman with dudman, a scarecrow. The latter looks like a mere variation but its senses show that it must have a different origin, though nobody knows what it is. We do know that it comes from duds in the sense of clothing, which came to refer particularly to rags and tatters. Duds is also the source of dud in the sense of something counterfeit, useless or broken.

I knew that dod referred to a bare-topped hill. This is a picture of Dodd Hill, near the border between England and Scotland.

There is a theory that Dodd became our family name because our original ancestor was a bald man.

 

As for the dod-duds thing, one of my nicknames in high school was Milk Dud (Mike Dodd) or more commonly just Dud. It sounds insulting, but if memory serves me, it was an affectionate name and didn't bother me. For a number of years, I signed my letters to high school friends as Dud.

On an episode of The Big Bang Theory, Sheldon Cooper says that Milk Duds are the most apologetic of the boxed candies. I'm sorry.