Posted on: Monday, January 10, 2005
'Who's your daddy?' goes mainstream
By Paul Farhi
Washington Post
It's not really a question, even with that punctuation mark appended to the end. Instead, it's a demand, a boast, an all-around statement of superiority in three simple, yet quizzical words: "Who's your daddy?"
Who, indeed. This question keeps popping up. "Who's your daddy?" has gone mainstream.
It's been the title of a 2003 straight-to-video movie (starring Ali Landry, heretofore semi-famous as the Doritos spokesmodel), and of a popular 2002 song and video by country singer Toby Keith.
It was the chant by New York Yankees fans during the 2004 baseball playoffs, and the name of a recent, new-low-in-reality-TV "special" on the Fox network (adult female contestant, adopted as an infant, tries to guess which man is her biological father).
While the phrase has its innocent overtones — in the 1969 Zombies hit "Time of the Season," the singer investigates a potential love interest by inquiring, "What's your name, who's your daddy?" — its most direct and historic meaning has been sexual. The origins of the full phrase are obscure, but the slang use of "daddy" has long been associated with prostitution. According to the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang, the oldest usage dates to 1681.
In old blues songs, dating to at least 1909, "daddy" is slang for pimp. Later on, the term was generalized in black speech to mean any male lover, and had variants, such as "sugar daddy," that survive to this day, according to the slang dictionary.
The full phrase "Who's your daddy?" may have been given its first widespread airing by radio deejay Doug "Greaseman" Tracht in the late 1980s and 1990s on his syndicated radio program. Tracht used the term comedically but left no doubt about its sexual aspects.
Tracht said he first heard the reference in the Zombies song. "I converted it to have a spicy connotation," he said. "As men we want validation because we are such inept lovers. ... It just kind of popped out of the blue."
Somehow the phrase mutated enough in meaning to become acceptable enough to broader audiences.
Keith, the country crooner, gave the phrase a suggestion of romance and protection for a hesitant lover when he sang: "And who's the one guy that you come runnin' to / When your love life starts tumblin'? / I got the money if you got the honey / Let's cut a deal let's make a plan ... Who's your daddy, who's your baby? / Who's your buddy, who's your man?"
And 60,000 Yankees fans probably weren't considering the origins of the phrase when they chanted it at Red Sox pitcher Pedro Martinez during Game 2 of the American League playoffs on Oct. 13. This was a few weeks after Martinez, in discussing his frustrations about pitching against the Yankees, had said: "I can't find a way to beat them at this point. What can I say? I just tip my hat and call the Yankees my daddy."
Martinez, of course, was using "daddy" in its contemporary, whitewashed form — to imply authority, dominance or power over another. (Example: "Oh yeah! I just cleaned you out in poker. Who's your daddy?!")
This kind of scrubbing of the crudest kind of slang goes on all the time, says Connie Eble, a professor of English at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and the author of "Slang and Sociability: In-Group Language Among College Students."
Unsavory terms that become acceptable are said by lexicographers to "ameliorate," or acquire a better connotation, she said. The process can go full circle, too, when a word with a neutral or positive connotation takes on a negative cast. The use of "suck" to mean "no good" or "defective" was considered shocking when it was first uttered on the prime-time sitcom "Uncle Buck" in 1990; now such a usage wouldn't raise an eyebrow.
