It is easy to conceive that such an epithet as _dogon_ might get itself mixed up with the word dog, and so become an imprecation.

For instance, a servant in the family of a friend of mine in Indiana, wishing to resign her place before the return of some daughters of the house whom she had never seen, announced that she was going to leave "before them dog-on girls got home." Here the word might have been the old epithet, or an abbreviated participle.

_Dogged_ is apparently a corruption of dog-on in the phrase "I'll be dogged." I prefer _dog-on_ to _dogone_, because in the dialect the sense of setting a dog on is frequently present to the speaker, though far enough away from the primitive sense of the word; perhaps.].