[9] Like many of the ear-marks of this dialect, the verb "dog-on" came from Scotland, presumably by the way of the north of Ireland. A correspondent of The Nation calls attention to the use of "dagon" as Scotch dialect in Barrie's "Little Minister," a recent book. On examining that story, I find that the word has precisely the sense of our Hoosier "dog-on," which is to be pronounced broadly as a Hoosier pronounces dog—"daug-on." If Mr. Barrie gives his a the broad sound, his "dagon" is nearly identical with "dog-on." Here are some detached sentences from "The Little Minister:"
"Beattie spoke for more than himself when he said: 'Dagon that Manse! I never gie a swear but there it is glowering at me.'"
"'Dagon religion,' Rob retorted fiercely; 't spoils a' thing.'"
"There was some angry muttering from the crowd, and young Charles Yuill exclaimed, 'Dagon you, would you lord it ower us on week-days as well as on Sabbaths?'"
"'Have you on your Sabbath shoon or have you no on your Sabbath shoon?' 'Guid care you took I should ha'e the dagont things on!' retorted the farmer."
It will be seen that "dagont," as used above, is the Scotch form of "dog-oned." But Mr. Barrie uses the same form apparently for "dog-on it" in the following passage:
"Ay, there was Ruth when she was na wanted, but Ezra, dagont, it looked as if Ezra had jumped clean out o' the Bible!"
Strangely enough, this word as a verb is not to be found in Jamieson's dictionary of the Scottish dialect, but Jamieson gives "dugon" as a noun. It is given in the supplement to Jamieson, however, as "dogon," but still as a noun, with an ancient plural dogonis. It is explained as "a term of contempt." The example cited by Jamieson is Hogg's "Winter Tales," I. 292, and is as follows:
"What wad my father say if I were to marry a man that loot himsel' be thrashed by Tommy Potts, a great supple wi' a back nae stiffer than a willy brand? . . . When one comes to close quarters wi' him he's but a dugon."
Halliwell and Wright give dogon as a noun, and mark it Anglo-Norman, but they apparently know it only from Jamieson and the supplement to Jamieson, where dogguin is cited from Cotgrave as meaning "a filthie old curre," and doguin from Roquefort, defined by "brutal, currish" [hargneux]. A word with the same orthography, doguin, is still used in French for puppy. It is of course a question whether the noun dogon and its French antecedents are connected with the American verb dog-on. It is easy to conceive that such an epithet as dogon might get itself mixed up with the word dog, and so become an imprecation. For instance, a servant in the family of a friend of mine in Indiana, wishing to resign her place before the return of some daughters of the house whom she had never seen, announced that she was going to leave "before them dog-on girls got home." Here the word might have been the old epithet, or an abbreviated participle. Dogged is apparently a corruption of dog-on in the phrase "I'll be dogged." I prefer dog-on to dogone, because in the dialect the sense of setting a dog on is frequently present to the speaker, though far enough away from the primitive sense of the word; perhaps.