“I figured there must be animals in Ottawa, so we went up there and it was a success,” he said. Skedaddle’s business plan came together in the early 1980s when Dowd pursued hockey for the Ottawa 67 and later the New York Islanders. © Skedaddle Mueller in front of a service truck. “We like to take care of the people who are in “I think once we get one location in Cleveland, someone’s going to see our trucks and want to buy another territory,” he said. The company hopes to open five to 10 new locations this year in America, Dowd said. And the Pacific Northwest,” also is ripe for franchising. “Being close to America here, the Eastern seaboard is a great market around the Great Lakes, it’s a great area. is going to have wildlife issues, whether it’s rats, mice, birds,” he said. “You must be properly capitalized and have some money to get into owning a business, but we will be able to work with that franchisee and ramp it up quickly.”ĭowd said the company is very “American influenced” since it’s so close to the border and he spent a number of years living in the U.S. If you want to grow something for yourself and family, want a work life balance and are willing to learn, the sky is the limit,” Dowd said. Mueller recently purchased a second territory in Madison, and is looking to buy the Green Bay market, Dowd said. Mueller, for example, has a master of science in wildlife ecology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he studied coyotes and foxes and was “looking for unique, humane business model.” “You don’t need any information or experience in wildlife to be a franchise operator. It is more probable that “skedaddle” is rooted in the Irish word “sgedadol,” meaning “scattered,” or the Scots word “”skiddle,” meaning “to spill or scatter.” Given the Scots-Irish heritage of many of the states central to the Civil War, these both seem like reasonable bets to me.© Skedaddle Mueller sealing the deal with Dowd. There are theories that attempt to trace “skedaddle” to various Swedish or Danish words but fail on lack of evidence. The relatively sudden appearance of “skedaddle” as a fully-formed word, with no known ancestors in English, tends to argue for its importation from another language. There are a number of theories about the origin of “skedaddle,” but no definite answer to the puzzle. In military use there were definite overtones of cowardice under fire in “skedaddle,” but as the word quickly percolated into civilian usage, it came to mean simply “to leave quickly” or “to run away.” “Skedaddle” first appeared in written accounts of battles in that war, used to mean “to retreat quickly to flee” (“As soon as the rebs saw our red breeches … coming through the woods they skedaddled,” 1862). There’s also the fact that the word in question is actually spelled “skedaddle,” and its spelling has been fairly constant since it came into use during the American Civil War. Too many people would have to simultaneously adopt that usage for it to make any sense to anyone. It’s just not the way the language works. But while some English words have been formed by combining other words (“motel” from “motor hotel,” for instance), I can’t think of an instance of an entire phrase (such as “Let’s get out of here”) being slurred into a single word. While you were reading that paragraph, I was softly repeating “scidattle” over and over to myself, and after awhile it did start to sound a bit like “let’s get out of here,” especially if you say it very quickly with a Brooklyn accent. But just last week I watched Pokie attack a tree that hadn’t moved in at least ten years and didn’t seem to be menacing anyone, so we may have to rethink that bargain. We originally let these two freeloaders, Brownie and Pokie, live here on the assumption that they would provide some basic security. By the way, “you guys” really doesn’t apply in this case, because it’s just me and a bunch of illiterate cats here, plus two dogs who are of no use at all unless your heart’s desire is to find the nearest dead possum. If my hypothesis is incorrect, can you guys find out where “scidattle” came from? Boy, I sure hope so. Dear Word Detective: I’m wondering if the slang word “scidattle,” as is “let’s scidattle” or “time to scidattle,” may originate from a shortened version of “let’s get out of here,” which, when said quickly, has a similar sound and meaning.
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