Hi this is Tutor Nick P and this is Word Origins 76. The word origin today is
slowpoke. All right. I don't know if anybody ever wondered where do we get
slowpoke from. Obviously it means a very slow person. We know slow. The slow makes
a lot of sense, but why do we say slowpoke ? I mean did we did we poke people
with our finger that was slow. Hey, you why are you so slow ? So anyway in this video I'm going to try to explain where slowpoke came from anyway
Let's take a look at the note here. If we say that someone is a slowpoke,
we mean that he or she is a person that moves very slowly or takes a very
long time to do a particular thing. I remember when I was a kid, I think kids
actually use it even more, but even adults do. We sometimes kind of....
We use it in a humorous way to tell somebody "Oh my God ! Why are you so slow ?
Hurry up." All right. Let's continue. The earliest known citing is from John
Russell Bartlett's Dictionary of Americanisms.You know. like American
slang or idioms. Things like that, Americanisms. The British also have a
term slowcoach which is used in the same way. So Americans say slowpoke. The British
say slowcoach. Okay. Let's continue. The origin of slowpoke is believed to come
from an old use of the meaning of poke that is no longer used today. So that's
why we don't recognize it anymore. Poke used to have a meaning of to dawdle
away. Which means to waste time and move very slowly. So that's really where it
came from. Even in our present time, we still use
the adjective "pokey" and that could be spelt with with an "E" and without an "E."
Not the most common adjective, but it's we it's still in the dictionary and it is
still used. All right and all right. And really that also this pokey means moving
very slowly in an annoying way. And actually slowpoke sometimes is annoying
that they're moving that slowly. All right. Let's just look at three examples for
the way we often might hear it today. I don't want Jack to be on our team, he
is such a slowpoke. Yeah. This could be perfectly heard like with kids playing
you know, maybe they don't want a certain other kid to be on the team. You know,
because maybe he runs too slowly. So we often called somebody that ran too
slowly a slowpoke too. All right. Here's the second example. I am stuck on this single-
lane road. Yeah. Basically behind a driver who is a slowpoke. Okay. Yeah. We
sometimes all felt that way when we're driving and you have this driver in
front of you and he's just going at maybe below the speed limit. And maybe
you can't get around and you don't want to go to the other side of the road or
maybe there is no other side of the road. So you might hear, especially a driver
with road rage saying , " Oh my god ! This driver is such a slowpoke. " Okay. Good and
let's read the third one here. Example number three. My God ! You are a slowpoke.
How long is it going to take you to finish this project ? Okay. Good. Anyway, I
hope you got it. I hope it was clear. I hope was informative. Thank you for your time.
Bye-bye.