By Anatoly Liberman
This essay is an exercise in artless dodging. It contains an attempt to shed light on the etymology of two slang words whose origin is lost and to connect them, even though they have nothing to do with each other. Dickens, with his Artful Dodger, and the auto industry popularized dodge beyond its merit. The verb seems to have greater frequency than the noun, but my observation is not supported by any statistics. In any case, the noun is also fine. Dr. Dolittle said to his young companion Tommy Stubbins when he saw a note written in blood: “It turns the color when it’s dry. Somebody pricked his finger to make these pictures. It’s an old dodge when you’re short of ink, but highly unsanitary.”
Dodge has been known from texts since the late fifteen-sixties. The verb was first recorded as meaning “palter, haggle, trifle.” Later the senses “shift one’s position” and “play fast and loose” came to light. The earliest known citation of dodge “to jog” (now dialectal) is dated 1803. The noun dodge appeared approximately at the same time. Our success to solve the word’s etymology partly depends on whether we penetrate the history of its final consonant. The sound designated in Modern English by j or -ge may go back to -gg, at one time followed by i or a so-called yod, that is, a sound like y- in yes, as in bridge, edge, wedge, and ridge, or to -ge in Old French, as in forge (whether meaning “smithy” or “fabricate”), gorge, and large. Unfortunately, no etymological rule ever covers all cases. Thus, ledge lacks an ancient English ancestor, and, while gorge clearly descends from an Old French noun meaning “throat,” the origin of gorgeous (apparently, also from French) is obscure. Sometimes final -ch was voiced for no obvious reason, so that today it is undistinguishable from -dge in bridge, even though spelling may have taken no notice of the change. Dictionaries list both hotchpotch and hodgepodge, but to pronounce Greenwich correctly, one must not be deceived by -ch. American Norwich is just Nor-wich, whereas British Norwich is usually Norridge. The pairs smutch ~ smudge and slush ~ sludge probably have the history of the hotchpotch ~ hodgepodge type. Still another circumstance has to be mentioned. Once upon a time gg yielded what has become -dge if i or a yod followed it, but in present day English, d- behaves in the same way, so that in informal speech (and not only!) did you becomes diju. We owe the only possible modern pronunciation of soldier to this habit.
Some modern words are spelled like bridge and edge; yet they derive from neither Old English nor Old French. To complicate matters, they do not seem to have ever had i or a yod after g- or d- and are united only by an expressive character we note in verbs like nudge, trudge, fudge, grudge, and budge. The earlier recorded variant of trudge is tredge, which must be related to tread, but the nature of the relationship is unclear, for where did -dge come from? The pair dreg/dredge resembles tread/