Jump On The Trolley

Nobody knows why fists are known as "Dukes." This disappoints me.


There are three completely different explanations out there, none of which is especially plausible. One is about Dukes being rhyming British slang, where "Duke of York" refers to forks, which is a slang for fingers (pretty weaksauce connection). Another says that "Dookin" is Romany for fortune telling using the palm of the hand, but has nothing to do with fists, and the third is about Marquis of Queensbury who developed a set of rules for boxing...which would be the best explanation if the 9th Marquis of Queensbury (for whom the rules are named) was actually a Duke. He was not.


Regardless of the lack of proper explanation, the phrase "put up your dukes" is roughly never used anymore. While that is a darn shame, when it does pop up in modern culture, it serves to amuse as well as to harken back to a different era.

This happens in music most notably (and probably only) when the Pat Benatar song "Hit Me With Your Best Shot" comes on the radio, as it did not long ago when I started thinking about the etymology of the phrase "put up your dukes." There are only 2 other known songs that use the phrase, based on a Google search I looked at the first page of just now.

I'm amused when things like this happen, but I also stop to think about things that I create as well. When songwriters use modern slang in their lyrics, they are catering to the modern audience of the day, but they're also limiting the lifetime of their work. That song will only be fashionable as long as that particular piece of slang is popular. Once the lingo changes, your song instantly becomes outdated and passe. Pat Benatar did this to herself, as did Grand Funk Railroad, whose song "American Band" is the last known song to include the phrase "Party Down" before people realized what a stupid phrase that is and never used it again. Heck, even The Great W.A. Mozart managed to do this in his works. (I'm not making that piece up, by the way)

Many of you know that I'm a writer of sorts. Most of my personal writing (we'll leave alone the technical writing I do for work) is in jaunty Blag form, as witnessed here. That said, some of you are aware that I have written a short story and various pieces of a sitcom which will likely never see the light of day, but that's beside the point. I hear things like "put up your dukes" and wonder how much of that type of thing I've already incorporated into my writing. What words or phrases did I use in my short story that will be archaic in the nearish future that will brand my work as a relic from the 2010s? How can I avoid that in the future, or do I just tell the future to Eat My Shorts?