👉 Okay, let’s tackle this wonderfully prickly little squiggle of a word – "Idday.” Now, before you frantically start googling for obscure Finnish swear oaths (nope! Sadly not that far afield), let me assure you, the origin and exact meaning are delightfully… nebulous.
Basically? Nobody actually knows what it definitively means . 19th century American lexicographers appear to have just... slapped it down in their dictionaries as a nonsense syllable of exasperation. Think of a perfectly polite, slightly stuffy gentleman who’s just witnessed something profoundly ridiculous and simply throws his hands up with the volume of a small, contained but utterly furious storm. Essentially, "Idday" isn't a word for anything specific, rather an emphatic expression of utter dismissal! It is that feeling when you realise your carefully laid plans have just spectacularly imploded and you genuinely feel something akin to existential disappointment. There are some folk who reckon it’s the contracted form of a minced oath (something old-fashioned folks used to avoid saying outright—basically, a verbal loophole), maybe originating from the word "'od!," a contraction of that earlier exclamation. Others say they simply just needed a fancy way to represent the feeling and made it up. The point is: the beauty, frankly, lies in its unfootedness. It’s a little bit of glorious, beautifully pointless frustration. You can practically hear the sigh behind the syllable. Here
