dooce

Definition: (verb) to fire someone because of the content on their personal web page

Example: Roy had a successful career as a Disney animator but he was dooced after they found his online cartoons showing Mickey Mouse involved in various criminal acts.

Quote:

“Dooce is pronounced like DEUCE, not like douche or like doo-chay or dookie. Please don’t call me dookie (feces), because seriously, given my personal bowel history, that would be entirely inaccurate.”
- Heather Armstrong of dooce.com

Armstrong is a celebrity for getting fired. In 2002, she lost her job when her employer discovered critical comments about her coworkers on her web log. After her case was discussed extensively on the internet, the name of her site became the most common way to describe this new phenomenon.

On dooce.com, she explains that the word originally came about from her constant mistyping of the word dude (man). It is usually used in passive voice ("he was dooced") and as Heather notes, has the same pronunciation as deuce.

And that earlier word is not so different in its negative meaning. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it was a euphemism for “damned” and often spelled like the current slang word. As Lord John says in Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1913 adventure book The Poison Belt, “It's dooced interestin', and no mistake about that.”

A. C. Kemp | January 27, 2005


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