Just a smidge

I LOVE THE MOVIE "Rio Bravo" with John Wayne, Dean Martin and Walter Brennan, but there's something that always bothers me. Near the end, Brennan wonders rhetorically if it'd be all right if he got cleaned up a smidge and went out for a drink. "That wouldn't hurt me none, would it?"

Would someone in the 1880s have used the word smidge? I had my doubts.

Still, it's possible. I looked up smidgen (which has since been shortened to smidge). It apparently comes from the English smitch and first was used around 1845.

So it's very possible that smidge was used correctly.

THE SEARCH, BY the way, led me to something interesting: The OneLook Dictionary Search. I'll use that again.

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