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Quotations about Dotards
The interwebs are all abuzz with the word "dotard" after yesterday's news reports of verbal escalations between the leaders of the United States and North Korea. It means one whose intellect has become impaired by age; one who is in his dotage or second childhood; weak, silly, foolish. The word was used in an English translation of neulg-dali-
A dotard's ravings in the hour of death,
When the tongue speaks without the sense's guidance.
~George William Lovell (1804–1878), Provost of Bruges, 1836
...to explain away the evil of his speech by attributing his unfortunate utterances to his dotage... ~A Southern Republican, "Toombs and the Scalawag," in The Republic, 1876
He drank a lusty draught, sat silent for some time, and at last broke out; I am come (quoth he) to insult thee for an old fantastick Dotard as thou art... ~Richard Steele, "On the Art of Growing Old," The Tatler, No 266, 1710 December 21st
Away with the dotard; to the jail with him! ~William Shakespeare, Taming of the Shrew, c.1593 [V, 1, Baptista Minola]
I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls,
And each damp thing that creeps and crawls
Went wobble-wobble on the walls...
Strange characters of woe and fear,
The humbugs of the social sphere...
And one, a dotard grim and gray,
Who wasteth childhood's happy day
In work more profitless than play...
~Lewis Carroll, "The Palace of Humbug," 1855
And you, ye doil'd dotard, ye stand there hammering dog-heads instead of earning bread for your family! ~Walter Scott, Waverley, 1814 [A little altered. 'Doiled' means dazed, confused. 'Doghead' is a part of a old-style gun.
Well, wipe your noses, little ones; and, you old dotards, mount your spectacles, and weigh these words... ~François Rabelais (c.1494–1553)
How wise they are that are but fools in love!...
But now intruding love dwells in my brain,
And franticly hath shoulder'd reason thence:
I am not old, and yet, alas! I doat;
I have not lost my sight, and yet am blind;
No bondman, yet have lost my liberty;
No natural fool, and yet I want my wit.
What am I, then? let me define myself:
A dotard young, a blind man that can see,
A witty fool, a bondman that is free.
~Joshua Cooke, A Pleasant Conceited Comedy; Wherein is Showed How a Man May Choose a Good Wife from a Bad, 1602 [Master Anselm]
Many Democrats, apparently shocked by the fiery and vehement utterances of their distinguished leader on the occasion alluded to, attempt to explain and palliate their effect upon the civilized world as being but the vapid mouthings of an old man in his dotage. ~A Southern Republican, "Toombs and the Scalawag," in The Republic, 1876
Banish me!
Banish your dotage; banish usury,
That makes the senate ugly.
~William Shakespeare, Timon of Athens, c.1607 [III, 5, Alcibiades]
Then you should hate Rome, as he does. Can you,
when you have pushed out your gates the very
defender of them, and, in a violent popular
ignorance, given your enemy your shield, think to
front his revenges with...
the palsied intercession of such a decayed dotant as
you seem to be? Can you think to blow out the
intended fire your city is ready to flame in, with
such weak breath as this? No, you are deceived...
~William Shakespeare, Coriolanus, c. 1607 [V, 2, First Senator]
...but Edward Young was a querulous old fashioned dotard...
Dotard (said he) let be thy deep advise;
Seems that through many years thy wits thee fail,
And that weak eld hath left thee nothing wise,
Else never should thy judgment be so frail,
To measure manhood by the sword or mail...
~Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, 1590
When a man is in his dotage is entirely a question of fact, not age; some men are in their dotage at fifty, others are not at ninety. ~A Freemasons guide from the early 1900s
Dotage — or a reasonable facsimile thereof — had crept up on me in that insidious way it has. Without realizing it, I had slumped, I had gotten into a little rut of living, doing the same things every day, accepting dullness and monotony as my natural lot. Just accepting, that was the worst of it, never testing my strength or using what powers I had left, and so taking it for granted that I had none. ~Cid Ricketts Sumner, "The fortune teller," A View from the Hill, 1957
Tush, tush, man; never fleer and jest at me:
I speak not like a dotard nor a fool,
As under privilege of age to brag
What I have done being young, or what would do
Were I not old. Know, Claudio, to thy head,
Thou hast so wrong'd mine innocent child and me
That I am forced to lay my reverence by
And, with grey hairs and bruise of many days,
Do challenge thee to trial of a man.
~William Shakespeare, Much Ado about Nothing, c.1598 [V, 1, Leonato]
Sometimes conservatism is simply radicalism in its dotage. ~"Poor Richard Junior's Philosophy," The Saturday Evening Post, 1906, George Horace Lorimer, editor
The miser must make up his plum,
And dares not touch the hoarded sum;
The sickly dotard wants a wife,
To draw off his last dregs of life.
~Matthew Prior (1664–1721), "Moral"
Never afflict yourself to know the cause;
But let his disposition have that scope
That dotage gives it.
~William Shakespeare, King Lear, c. 1605 [I, 4, Goneril]
Why not by th' hand, sir? How have I offended?
All's not offence that indiscretion finds
And dotage terms so.
~William Shakespeare, King Lear, c. 1605 [II, 4, Goneril]
"Then is he not more mad," (sayd Paridell)
"That hath himself unto such service sold,
In doleful thralldom all his days to dwell?
For sure a fool I do him firmly hold,
That loves his fetters, though they were of gold.
But why do we devise of others ill,
Whiles thus we suffer this same dotard old
To keep us out, in scorn of his own will,
And rather do not ransack all, and himself kill?"
~Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, 1590
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published 2017 Sep 22
last saved 2023 Aug 15
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