the.com/dummy
The insult you throw before checking if you're the one who's wrong.
means A dumb or stupid person, or something that's a fake stand-in for the real thing.
from From 'dumb,' which originally meant mute, unable to speak — the '-my' ending turned it into a noun for someone who couldn't talk. By the 1800s it had widened to mean a stupid person, and separately came to name mute stand-ins: a ventriloquist's dummy, a tailor's dummy, a crash-test dummy — all things shaped like a person but with nothing to say for themselves.
- crash test origin
- named after literal test crash dummies, 1950s
- etymology
- from dumb, meaning mute, not stupid
- pacifier usage
- british english for what americans call pacifier
- card games
- bridge term for the exposed, silent hand