Need a Replacement PDQ?

If I say “We need a replacement PDQ,” do you know WTF that means? You might, or you might guess, but let’s face it: PDQ is Prime Dad Quality stuff. It was major popular in the middle 20th century, but now it’s mainly an old-style joke, retro like a Kodak Instamatic. You’re more likely to encounter it now in the name of the satirical composer PDQ Bach (invented by Peter Schickele in 1965, and last seen in concert in 2015) than in earnest.

So… yeah, if you don’t know what PDQ stands for, your odds of guessing it are only middling. If I said it meant PFQ, would that help? How about if I replaced it with RFN? Would you get that I meant we need a replacement immediately?

Thing is, when PDQ first hit the scene in the later 1800s,* that D was something edgy. At that time, damn (or, more properly, damned) was the sort of thing you might bury in an initialism. Not that you wouldn’t say it out loud in the right context – the 1875** play The Mighty Dollar by B.E. Woolf has “If I had my way, I’d put all these newspapers down, P. D. Q. – pretty damned quick” – but you may remember that when Rhett Butler said “I don’t give a damn” in Gone with the Wind in 1939, audiences were scandalized.

By the latter half of the century, PDQ still had some edge to it, but not so much it couldn’t be marketed and published, just enough to make it popular… aided by the fact that you could always say it stood for “pretty darn quick.” In 1962, a Wisconsin-based chain of convenience stores took on the name PDQ Food Stores, which no doubt helped it get business (it was finally eaten by Kwik Trip stores in 2017). In 1965, Schickele’s PDQ Bach was a witty play for the sort of people who knew of the several Bach musical family members often referred to by initials – JS, JC, CPE, JCF. In the 1960s to the 1980s, Ovaltine marketed several drink mixes with names like PDQ Chocolate Flavor Beads and Strawberry PDQ, and from 1965 to 1969, there was a game show called PDQ sponsored by the brand… although on the show, they said PDQ stood for “Please Draw Quickly.”

Even to the end of the century (and millennium), the term still had some verve. The 1998 Macintosh PowerBook G3 Wallstreet II was called the PDQ (explained as “Pretty Darn Quick”… insert eyeroll emoji). The same year, Qualcomm released its pdQ Smartphone, which integrated a Palm Pilot PDA (personal digital assistant) with a digital cell phone almost a decade before the first iPhone (plausibly pdQ is a merger of PDA with the Q of Qualcomm, but… you know).

But in the intervening quarter of a century, swearing has gone forward a couple of steps, specifically from D to F. It’s not that no one used the word fuck before then; after all, SNAFU dates to 1941, and though it was often defined as “situation normal, all fouled up,” everyone always knew what the F stood for. But now F is much more of a BFD. While use of PDQ has dropped off, uh, rapidly since 2000, use of WTF has skyrocketed (and not just because the world is effed). IDGAF hit the scene by the early 1980s, but shot up in popularity after 2010, and although OMG has been around for more than a century, OMFG has hit its popularity just in the new millennium. These days, in any new colloquial acronym, we provisionally assume a medial F stands for fucking (TFG for the former guy is often read as that fucking guy), and a final F has a good AF reason to be taken as fuck, unless we know otherwise, as in PDF.

Which, if it didn’t stand for portable document format, would seem like it could mean pretty damn fast – or perhaps pretty damn fucked. But if we were making up PDQ today, would it be PFQ? The pretty and quick also don’t seem as au courant. How about real fucking quick? Oh, wait, RFQ is request for quote. How about very fucking fast? Hmm, VFF – not really your BFF. I’d suggest LFS for lickety fuckin’ split, but do the youths even know that term? If the youths DGAF, you’re SOL.

In fact, we may do better to look at it from a different angle altogether: in terms of time frame rather than speed. ASAP (as soon as possible) passed PDQ in popularity decades ago, and we now have ASAFP ready to hand if we want it. But if you’re talking about action in the present, you could as readily say you want something RFN (right fucking now, in case you didn’t figure it out at first sight) – which is in use, but not in heavy use.

But there isn’t (yet) a truly obvious heir apparent. Well, the world isn’t slowing down – we need to apply ourselves to finding a replacement PDQ. LFG!

* Peter Gilliver informs me that an 1837 antedating (from a New York newspaper!) has been found and will be added to the entry PDQ.

** The OED lists it as 1893, citing a date given in a 1943 collection, but the play was premiered in 1875, and the quote I’m using is from the performance script – see https://www.bartleby.com/lit-hub/a-library-of-american-literature/dialogue-from-the-mighty-dollar/