Macquarie WOTY: muffin top

Dave Wilton dave at WILTON.NET
Fri Jan 26 15:15:52 UTC 2007


There are no usage citations or additional information in the main Macquarie
entry.

This 6 October 2004 story shows that "muffin top" was used on "Kath & Kim"
at least as early as that date,
http://www.abc.net.au/wa/stories/s1214322.htm: "During the wide ranging
conversation the two relationships - Kath and Kel, Kim and Brett - are
compared and Kim's "muffin top" are discussed."


--Dave Wilton
  dave at wilton.net


-----Original Message-----
From: American Dialect Society [mailto:ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf Of
Lynne Murphy
Sent: Friday, January 26, 2007 7:31 AM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: Re: Macquarie WOTY: muffin top

Thanks to Ben and Stephen for the 2003-04 citations for 'muffin top'.  But
now I'm undone by my own reading comprehension failures.  On second glance,
they're not claiming that the word was coined in 2005 (just noting its ADS
WotY success in 2005).  So, the next question is when that Kath and Kim
episode was.  I'm working on it, but I'm undone again by the fact that I
can't subscribe to the Macquarie Dictionary on-line because they're using
an old security certificate on their site and my computer refuses to do
business with them.

Lynne

--On Thursday, January 25, 2007 3:28 pm +0000 Benjamin Zimmer
<bgzimmer at BABEL.LING.UPENN.EDU> wrote:

> On 1/25/07, Stephen Goranson <goranson at duke.edu> wrote:
>>
>> Quoting Lynne Murphy <m.l.murphy at SUSSEX.AC.UK>:
>>
>> > Can anyone antedate their 2005 Kath & Kim claim?
>>
>> Courier Mail (Queensland, Australia)
>> July 28, 2004 Wednesday
> [...]
>> For an unfriendly fashion that can render even slim young girls
>> unsightly, with middles spilling over the top of tight jeans in what has
>> become known as the "muffin top" effect, it has proved to be alarmingly
>> enduring.
>
> Also cited in Grant Barrett's Double-Tongued entry:
> http://www.doubletongued.org/index.php/dictionary/muffin_top/
>
>
> --Ben Zimmer



Dr M Lynne Murphy
Senior Lecturer and Head of Department
Linguistics and English Language
Arts B135
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QN

phone: +44-(0)1273-678844
http://separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.com

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org



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