dodaars / doudo

The origin of dodo is disputed between two candidate languages, both of which plausibly contributed to the word. The Portuguese doudo (or doido) means 'fool, simpleton, stupid' — from a Portuguese adjective describing madness or stupidity — and was applied to the Mauritian dodo (Raphus cucullatus) by Portuguese sailors who encountered the bird on the island of Mauritius in the early sixteenth century. The bird's extraordinary tameness in the presence of humans — it had evolved in the absence of any land predators and had no instinct to flee — made it appear to early observers as almost incomprehensibly stupid, walking up to sailors who then clubbed it to death for food. The Dutch dodaars, meaning 'fat-arse' or 'knot-arse' (from dod, a knot or bunch, and aars, buttocks), was applied to the bird by Dutch sailors who came to Mauritius after the Portuguese and who reached for a different but equally dismissive anatomical description. English dodo most likely derives from the Portuguese doudo, which was recorded earlier, though the Dutch influence cannot be excluded.

The dodo (Raphus cucullatus) was a large flightless bird endemic to the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean — the only member of its genus. It was a member of the pigeon family (Columbidae), distantly related to the Nicobar pigeon, and it had evolved over millions of years of island isolation into a large, heavy, flightless form adapted to a forest environment with abundant food and no natural predators. Adults weighed between ten and eighteen kilograms and stood roughly one meter tall. They nested on the ground and had wings too small for flight. The Portuguese first recorded the dodo around 1507, when Mauritius was discovered as a stopping point on the sea route to India. By 1681 — less than two centuries after European contact — the dodo was extinct, eliminated by the combined effects of hunting by sailors, habitat destruction by the colonists who settled Mauritius, and predation by the rats, pigs, and monkeys that arrived with European ships.

The dodo's extinction was one of the first thoroughly documented extinctions of a species in the modern era, and it was recorded with enough specificity — the last confirmed sightings, the testimonies of travelers, the specimens brought to Europe — that it became a kind of baseline case for the phenomenon of human-caused extinction. The word dodo therefore acquired a meaning that extends far beyond its taxonomic referent: it became a byword for the gone, the irreversible, and the helplessly defunct. 'Dead as a dodo' — a phrase attested from at least the late nineteenth century — uses the bird's extinction as the gold standard of permanent unavailability. The phrase works because the dodo's extinction was so complete that not even a living specimen exists in captivity, and because the bird's reputation for stupidity created an ironic echo: the dodo was eliminated partly because it was not afraid of the humans who killed it.

The dodo achieved a curious cultural afterlife through Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865), in which the Dodo is a character in the caucus race — a kindly, slightly pompous figure presiding over a deliberately pointless running contest. Carroll's Dodo was a self-portrait (he sometimes stuttered his own name as 'Do-Do-Dodgson') and it was not meant to be particularly ironic. But the combination of Carroll's Dodo, the extinction-phrase 'dead as a dodo,' and the scientific narrative of a naive, helpless bird overwhelmed by human contact created an extraordinarily potent cultural image: the dodo as the emblem of extinction, of evolutionary dead-ends, of things that cannot adapt. The bird that Portuguese sailors called stupid became the twentieth century's symbol for obsolescence itself — any technology, institution, or practice dismissed as a dodo is being told it has already died, it just hasn't realized it yet.