A mild oath or exclamation used to express frustration or annoyance, often a euphemistic substitute for a stronger curse word.
From 'doggone,' itself a euphemistic alteration of 'God damn' that emerged in American English in the 1800s. The '-ing' suffix creates an adjectival form used to modify nouns.
This is a perfect example of how English speakers create 'clean' swear words—by rearranging sounds and syllables to avoid saying something truly offensive. Doggone and its variants were especially popular in American dialect and frontier literature.
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