#708 Animal Dibs

The other day I was listening to something and whoever it was said “Hurry in and get first dibs on this great offering.”
Now I always like to contemplate how hard it is to be a foreigner and have to deal with learning American. Strange pronunciation rules are bad enough. But words like dib are likely not to be in your basic English/Foreign dictionary.
It’s certainly not in the basic thesaurus in my spellchecker. So if I were to say “I get dibs on that doodad,” it’s entirely possible I’d upset some poor frustrated immigrant enough for them to go postal.
“Doodad,” by the way, is in the thesaurus of my spellchecker, which lists as synonyms, thing, thingy, thingamabob, gizmo and doohickey. All words that fail to produce a red squiggly line underneath them, so they are totally Microsoft Word spellchecker approved.
Wow. Verbal legitimacy for doohickey. For shizzle.
So, from whence cometh the term dib? I’ve been placing dibs on things since kindergarten. But I’ve never actually seen a dib in the flesh.
I know what a dab is. It’s something you apply with a brush. Or any small amount of something. Would you like cream with that? Just a dab.
I’m pretty sure it’s less than a dollop and more than a smidge.
But a dib? Etymology dot com says that it’s “dibs”—there is no singular dib. It’s a “...children’s word to express a claim on something, origin 1932 in the U.S., apparently a contraction of dibstone ‘a knucklebone or jack in a children’s game from 1692 of unknown origin.’”
Dibs comes from dibstone but we don’t know where dibstone comes from. Except that it involve knucklebones of some sort.
Eeyew.
I love it that the word outlasted the game that spawned it. Kind of like when we call naval folk “sailors”, even though the American naval vessels they are likely to serve on are currently without sails.
Or when our keypadded or touchscreened cellular phones have a dialtone.
The idea I’d like to claim dibs on for a future essay is that kids once played a game with the knucklebones of some animal.
That’s a toy someone was willing to kill for.
America, ya gotta love it.