A dingleberry can mean one of three things, but the real meaning is vaccinium erythrocarpum, a specific cranberry species. It’s also commonly known as the mountain blueberry, the southern mountain cranberry, the bearberry and the arando.
The slang meanings can refer to a stupid or foolish person, or fecal and toilet paper fragments adhering to anal hair. I’m sure I was called a dingleberry at one time or another, but today I’m talking about things that remind people of the second slang meaning.
Dangling Things
Some things are called dingleberries when they really aren’t. They just kind of look like dingleberries. I don’t know what else to call them. They’re basically puffs of some type of fabric, placed all in a row. I once had a 1974 Chevy Impala, blue with a white top. The first owner was a Mexican-American who put dingleberries (that was the only thing I could think to call them) around the border of the front windshield, on the inside. I can think of any object better than a dingleberry to serve that purpose.
The second owner left them in place, sold the car to me, and then bought it back from me when I transferred from the base we were both stationed at. I didn’t bother to remove them while I had it. The Mexicans south of the border left my car alone when I was there, and probably because of those dingleberries.
Some of my nieces in the Philippines, or their mothers, bought polka-dot shorts trimmed with little white dingleberries at the bottom of each leg back in January 2018. They were really inexpensive at about 50 pesos (about one single United States dollar) each. I told them what dingleberry means and what the shorts looked like to me. One of my nieces started cutting them off almost immediately. The others followed suit. I saw them wearing the shorts without the dingleberries for months before I left the country.
The Cranberry Dingleberry
I’ve never seen one, and I probably never will. I’ve seen cranberries sold in supermarkets, including the cranberry jelly that gets sliced up for the Thanksgiving and Christmas Day dinners. They are not the same as the dingleberry cranberries.
I love cranberry juice. I’m happy when I can find 100 percent cranberry juice. Although I hated cranberries when I was young, I can eat dozens at a time today. So, as far as the dingleberry is concerned, this is the only kind I care about.
Image by Sten Porse, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons