In 1895 George Bernard Shaw wrote an article for the Saturday Review in which he talked about a play entitled Fedora. That play, by the way, is where the “fedora hat” got its name. Shaw was not very impressed by the play. In fact, he hated it, even though it starred the then-famous actress Sarah Bernhardt.
Shaw may have hated the play because it starred Sara Bernhardt. This play, you see, was really not a serious piece of theater at all — it was just a vehicle for Miss Bernhardt. Shaw, who wrote serious plays, thought it was claptrap, and called out Bernhardt for involving herself in “a high modern development of the circus.”
Even though Shaw didn’t think much of the play, or in fact the whole genre of plays written mostly just to feature somebody famous, it was a pretty successful genre. It was probably one of the first versions of a kind of entertainment that’s become very common. Think of nearly any movie that’s primarily popular not because of its story or message or even quality, but simply because of who stars in it.
Fedora was written by Victorien Sardou, who wrote 69 others quite a bit like it. Sardou was a French playwright, and he wrote extravagant, spectacular shows designed to highlight the star. The plots, at least what plots there were, tended to be melodramatic and overwritten, but just as modern audiences love explosions and high-speed chases, audiences in the late 1800s ate Sardou’s stuff up.
Shaw, though, was having none of it, and blamed Sardou. He came up with the word “sardoodledom” to mean Sardou’s works, as well as any similar sort of theatrical production. He used the word more than once after coining it in relation to Fedora — here, for instance, he’s talking about a later production: “It is rather a nice point whether Miss Ellen Terry should be forgiven for sailing the Lyceum ship into the shallows of Sardoodledom for the sake of Madame Sans-Gêne.”
Although we would have plenty of occasion to use “sardoodledom” today, the word has nearly disappeared. Only nearly because in the 2007 National Spelling Bee it was one of the words in the final, televised rounds. Kennyi Aouad of Indiana had to spell it, which evidently he did, but only after he finished giggling.
