Boughten bread

[Baker, John]

        "Store-bought" was certainly a familiar term to me, growing up in south-central Kentucky in the 1960s.  The counterpart is "home-made."  Store-bought has almost passed out of my vocabulary; almost everything is store-bought, so I rarely need a special term to describe store-bought things.

        It seems unfortunate that the teacher thought it necessary to tear down a sign with a word in dialect.  She sounds like a good teacher otherwise.

        Here's an earlier cite for "store-bought," from our old friends at the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals:  "The sheriff had testified that the seven gallons of whisky found by him was homemade and not store-bought whisky."  Dirden v. State, 93 Tex.Crim. 324, 247 S.W. 870, 871 (Tex.Crim.App. Jan. 24, 1923).

John Baker


-----Original Message-----
From: James A. Landau [mailto:JJJRLandau at AOL.COM]
Sent: Wednesday, December 10, 2003 10:45 AM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: Re: Boughten bread


I don't recall ever having heard "boughten"; the adjective was
"store-bought".  I must admit I don't recall ever having heard "store-bought" used in
conversation, except jocularly, but I must have run across it numerous times in text
purporting to show frontier dialog.

OED has "store-bought" with a suspiciously late first citation of 1952 (John
Steinbeck, _East of Eden_), and a variation not so far mentioned in ADS_L,
"store-boughten" with an 1883 first citation.