di di mau
verbEtymology
Borrowed from Vietnamese đi đi mau (“go quickly!”). Borrowed into English by American military personnel returning from the Vietnam War, as well as by Vietnamese immigrants; popularized by the movie The Deer Hunter. This is an uncommon way to say "Hurry up!" in Vietnamese. The verb đi (“to go”) can be expressed as a command: "Đi đi! One may even express a sense of urgency with the word mau (“fast”): "Đi mau đi! However, Vietnamese speakers tend to use the verbs mau lên, nhanh lên, and vội lên in exactly the way an English speaker would use hurry up.
Definitions
To leave quickly, hurry away.
- [Viet Cong guard, to prisoner forced to play Russian roulette:] MAU! MAU! DIDI MAU!
- And if a Vietnamese, be it man, woman, or child, refused to di di mau or tried to get away, the authorization was to go ’head and shoot ’em.
- “[…] No contact with any gooks. They just blew the bridges and di-di mau’d.” Since I knew that di-di means “go,” and that mau means “fast,” I knew that the VC had made themselves scarce.
The neighborhood
Vish — recursive loop
No curated loop yet for di di mau. Loops are being traced one word at a time while the ingestion pipeline matures.
sense glosses and etymology drawn from English Wiktionary · source · CC-BY-SA