Doodle
Encyclopedia
Drawing
Drawing is a form of visual art that makes use of any number of drawing instruments to mark a two-dimensional medium. Common instruments include graphite pencils, pen and ink, inked brushes, wax color pencils, crayons, charcoal, chalk, pastels, markers, styluses, and various metals .An artist who...
made while a person's attention is otherwise occupied. Doodles are simple drawings that can have concrete representational meaning or may just be abstract
Abstract art
Abstract art uses a visual language of form, color and line to create a composition which may exist with a degree of independence from visual references in the world. Western art had been, from the Renaissance up to the middle of the 19th century, underpinned by the logic of perspective and an...
shapes.
Stereotypical examples of doodling are found in school notebooks, often in the margins, drawn by students daydreaming or losing interest during class. Other common examples of doodling are produced during long telephone
Telephone
The telephone , colloquially referred to as a phone, is a telecommunications device that transmits and receives sounds, usually the human voice. Telephones are a point-to-point communication system whose most basic function is to allow two people separated by large distances to talk to each other...
conversations if a pen and paper are available.
Popular kinds of doodles include cartoon versions of teachers or companions in a school, famous TV or comic characters, invented fictional beings, landscapes, geometric shapes and patterns, textures, banners with legends, and animations made by drawing a scene sequence in various pages of a book or notebook.
Etymology
The word doodle first appeared in the early 17th century to mean a fool or simpleton. It derives from the German dudeln, to play (originally, to play the bagpipe or dudelsack). German variants of the etymon include Dudeltopf, Dudentopf, Dudenkopf, Dude and Dödel. American English dudeDude
A dude is an individual, typically male. The female equivalent, which is used less often, is "dudette" or "dudess". However, "dude" has evolved to become more unisex to encompass all genders, and this was true even in the 1950s....
may be a derivation of doodle.
The meaning "fool, simpleton" is intended in the song title "Yankee Doodle
Yankee Doodle
"Yankee Doodle" is a well-known Anglo-American song, the origin of which dates back to the Seven Years' War. It is often sung patriotically in the United States today and is the state anthem of Connecticut...
", originally sung by British colonial troops prior to the American Revolutionary War
American Revolutionary War
The American Revolutionary War , the American War of Independence, or simply the Revolutionary War, began as a war between the Kingdom of Great Britain and thirteen British colonies in North America, and ended in a global war between several European great powers.The war was the result of the...
. This is also the origin of the early eighteenth century verb to doodle, meaning "to swindle or to make a fool of". The modern meaning emerged in the 1930s either from this meaning or from the verb "to dawdle", which since the seventeenth century has had the meaning of wasting time or being lazy.
In the movie Mr. Deeds Goes to Town
Mr. Deeds Goes to Town
Mr. Deeds Goes to Town is a 1936 American screwball comedy film directed by Frank Capra, and starring Gary Cooper and Jean Arthur in her first featured role...
, Mr. Deeds mentions that "doodle" was a word made up to describe scribblings to help a person think. According to the DVD audio commentary track, the word as used in this sense was invented by screenwriter Robert Riskin
Robert Riskin
Robert Riskin was an American screenwriter and playwright, best known for his collaborations with director-producer Frank Capra.-Career:...
.
Internet giant Google has given a new dimension to the word by having "doodles" in its main page on certain acclaimed occasions.
Effects on memory
According to a study published in the scientific journal Applied Cognitive Psychology, doodling can aid a person's memory by expending just enough energy to keep one from daydreaming, which demands a lot of the brain's processing power, as well as from not paying attention. Thus, it acts as a mediator between the spectrum of thinking too much or thinking too little and helps focus on the current situation. The study was done by Professor Jackie Andrade, of the School of Psychology at the University of PlymouthUniversity of Plymouth
Plymouth University is the largest university in the South West of England, with over 30,000 students and is 9th largest in the United Kingdom by total number of students . It has almost 3,000 staff...
, who reported that doodlers in her experiment recalled 7.5 pieces of information (out of 16 total) on average, 29% more than the average of 5.8 recalled by the control group made of non-doodlers.
See also
- Asemic writingAsemic writingAsemic writing is a wordless open semantic form of writing. The word asemic means "having no specific semantic content". With the nonspecificity of asemic writing there comes a vacuum of meaning which is left for the reader to fill in and interpret. All of this is similar to the way one would...
- Automatic writingAutomatic writingAutomatic writing or psychography is writing which the writer states to be produced from a subconscious and/or spiritual source without conscious awareness of the content.-History:...
- DrolleriesDrolleriesDrolleries , often called a "grotesque", are decorative thumbnail images in the margins of Illuminated manuscripts, most popular from about 1250 through the 15th century, although found earlier and later...
- GraphologyGraphologyGraphology is the pseudoscientific study and analysis of handwriting, especially in relation to human psychology. In the medical field, it can be used to refer to the study of handwriting as an aid in diagnosis and tracking of diseases of the brain and nervous system...
- MarginaliaMarginaliaMarginalia are scribbles, comments, and illuminations in the margins of a book.- Biblical manuscripts :Biblical manuscripts have liturgical notes at the margin, for liturgical use. Numbers of texts' divisions are given at the margin...
- OekakiOekakiis the Japanese term to describe the act of drawing, meaning "doodle or scribble".-Ekaki uta/drawing songs:In Japan, songs that describe how to draw animals and/or favorite characters are called "Ekaki Uta". These songs are supposed to help children remember how to draw something by incorporating...
- ScribbleScribbleA scribble is a drawing composed of random and abstract lines, generally without ever lifting the drawing device off of the paper. Scribbling is most often associated with young children and toddlers, because their lack of hand–eye coordination and lower mental development often make it very...
- Stream of consciousness writing
- Stick FigureStick figureA stick figure is a very simple type of drawing made of lines and dots, often of the human form or other animals. In a stick figure, the head is represented by a circle, sometimes embellished with details such as eyes, mouth or crudely scratched-out hair. The arms, legs and torso are all...
- Ulam SpiralUlam spiralThe Ulam spiral, or prime spiral is a simple method of visualizing the prime numbers that reveals the apparent tendency of certain quadratic polynomials to generate unusually large numbers of primes...