‘Dibs’: the Great Northern Parking Tradition

By Allan Metcalf. Say the magic word, and it’s yours.
Please? No, not please. The magic word that truly cements ownership, at least for a lot of us, is dibs.
If you’re not familiar with dibs, you can look it up. For this word, the grand new Dictionary of American Regional English has first dibs for lookup. There we find dibs (always plural) defined as “a claim; rights; right of priority—often used as exclamation.” And DARE presents examples of use going back to 1930 in South Carolina. More...