say uncle
The oldest date on Online Etymology Dictionary is 1918 for a call for submission in the USA. But, they don't know why. Since that year is shortly after WWI, is it possible that the uncle that was...
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"Say 'uncle'" meaning "surrender" or so can be found as early as 1912 to my knowledge (and maybe earlier).There is an apparently antecedent joke about a parrot, which appeared repeatedly in the...
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Dave has an entry on this in the Big List"The OED2 includes a cite from American Speech in 1976 where the origin is traced to the Irish anacol, meaning an act of mercy or quarter. So, to say uncle...
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Note that "the origin is traced to ..." means merely "the origin is asserted to be ...". The paper in 1976 gave examples of Irish "anacol" = "mercy" but did not provide any example of "say...
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I'm sure we had a go-round about this before -- I remember being quite sarcastic about the "anacol" hypothesis -- but it seems to have slipped beneath the waves.
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I seem to have always heard and read it as "cry uncle", not as "say uncle".
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