If lackadaisy comes from "alak the day," it makes me wonder about whoopsydaisy... it's that just lament of a day you just REALLY messed up on? Is it one of those moments where your brain goes "hey, remember that time, in 4th grade?" That keeps you up at night?
Hehe. There is actually some conjecture among linguists and etymologists that lackadaisy and whoopsie-daisy are related. "Upaday" is the likely origin, according to Merriam-Webster, but I've not found any actual samples of its use in literature or editorial writing. Possibly it was just too much of a verbal informality to put into writing. If I had to guess, it's something akin to 'up and at em' - an abbreviated way of declaring it time to get up and start your day. ‘Up-a-dazy’ and ‘ups-a-daisy’ seem to have followed after, taking on the more playful tone one might exclaim when picking up a small child or coaxing them up out of playing in the dirt - conjuring the image of a little flower springing from the ground. 'Day' might have become 'daisy' as a sort of mirroring of the cadence of the already similar 'lackaday/lackadaisy', or it may just be coincidental. The added syllable creates a jaunty rhythm that's just sort of fun and natural-feeling. (The word 'daisy' is related to 'day' already, speculatively derived from 'day's eye'.) From there, it's not difficult to surmise how "ups" became "oops" and how 'oops' became 'whoops'. Why the meaning changed from getting up to falling down, though, I don't know. (Oops and whoops are more modern than you might think, coming from the early to mid-20th century. Ups-a-daisy long predates them.) Sometimes the morphology of a turn of phrase or a word is such a natural and gradual matter of dialectical adaptation, it's impossible to pin down exactly how it came about. It may just be that, on some base level, humans enjoy inventing fanciful phoneme formulas. ❀
