Dana said:
> oops
Dear Word Detective:
I read recently that the exclamation "Oops!" (and possibly its cousin
"Whoops!") comes from the ancient Roman goddess Ops. Is this true? I
mean, if one invokes an ancient Roman deity when one drops a bag of
marbles in a public library, one wants to know about it. -- D.M., via
the internet.
No, actually, it's a reference to the ancient Norse god of accidents,
Oopsie, who is usually depicted with one foot extended towards a
banana peel. Oopsie is, not surprisingly, the patron deity of personal
injury lawyers.
But seriously, you actually read this "Ops" flapdoodle somewhere? OK,
that's it. I want all the "did you know" newspaper columnists and
internet nut-jobs to listen closely to what I'm about to say: Knock it
off, right now. It's bad enough that you've convinced half the world
of the idiotic theory that "raining cats and dogs" comes from olden
times when pets were kept in the roofs of thatched huts and drowned in
heavy downpours. Or that "saved by the bell" refers to alarm devices
designed to prevent folks from being buried alive. But "oops" coming
from the Roman goddess Ops? Have you no shame?
Of course, as we all remember from the Mythology 101 course we took in
college to get out of Chemistry, there actually was a Roman goddess
named Ops. She was, according to Bullfinch's Mythology, "goddess of
the earth as a source of fertility, and a goddess of abundance and
wealth in general (her name means 'plenty')." But Ops had nothing to
do with "oops!"
"Oops!" (and, as you speculate, its cousin "Whoops!") are what the
Oxford English Dictionary calls "natural exclamations" -- the sort of
noise that a human being naturally makes when he (this recent example
involves a "he," namely "me") drops a pan of barbecued chicken on the
family dog. Oddly enough, the first example in print that the editors
of the Oxford English Dictionary have been able to find dates only
back to 1933, although I'm sure that dogs had been getting unexpected
chicken dinners long before then. "Whoops" in print is only a few
years older, dating back to 1925.
www.word-detective.com/072302.html 
Ooops. 
Linear Mode
