Doodles

The actor Doodles Weaver was born Winstead Sheffield Glenndenning Dixon Weaver.

I first encountered his name in the credits for The Birds (1963), and later as the narrator of the classic Goofy short Hockey Homicide (1945). A real inspiration, his name was, for who could not wish to be a weaver of doodles, to set on the loom a tossed-off sketch, to interlace the warp and weft of your marginalia?

Doodles Weaver's first credited film role was in 1937, one year after the release of  Frank Capra's Mr. Deeds Goes to Town. 1937 is also the year of the publication of the work to which the Oxford English Dictionary attributes the first usage of "doodle"—not in the sense of "a silly or foolish fellow; a noodle," but rather in the sense of "an aimless scrawl made by a person while his mind is more or less otherwise applied." The OED's source is Russell M. Arundel's Everybody's Pixillated: A Book of Doodles ("A 'doodle' is a scribbling or a sketch made while the conscious mind is concerned with matters wholely [sic] unrelated to the scribbling").

I mention Capra's film because it popularized "pixillated," which is best used to describe the batty or nutty—noodles, in other words. And, in fact, it is also the source of the word "doodle," which is what Mr. Deeds deems the above portrait.

The Oxford English Dictionary, then, is ever-so-slightly wrong.

And Doodles Weaver, by the way, appeared in an episode of the television series Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1962-63)—based, I trust it fair to wager, on Capra's 1939 film of the same title (a film I have long thought to be onomastically intriguing, as Jean Arthur's Clarissa Saunders believes her first name to be hopelessly embarrassing).