Antedating of "Jazz" as Verb

[Wilson Gray]

Yes, it is. "Snowball," used as a term of opprobrium for an old black
man with a full head of grey hair is at least a generation older than
I am. And, given that I know it only as a literary term that I found
in Ebony magazine back in the late 'Forties or early 'Fifties, it's
probably obsolete, except in the very deepest areas of the Deep South.

You know, I fervently hope that Ebony is digitized before I die. Well,
some day. It doesn't matter whether I'm dead or not. The older issues
are really full of good lexical stuff, such as, "If you wanna know
[Charlie Yard]Bird[Parker], you gotta _pay your dues_." There were
even brief lexical sections with the cooler and the goner examples of
what was once the hippest slang that can be found nowhere else;
collections of editorial cartoons,such are now found in the NYT; etc.

It's probably useless to hope that even older mags like Our World and
Sepia will ever the see the light of digital day. As far as I'm aware,
these were not collected by any major library, public or private.
You'd have to do what R. Crumb did to acquire his now-priceless
collection of black music: go from house to house in the 'hood to find
people with copies lying around somewhere.

-Wilson

On Tue, Sep 30, 2008 at 11:18 AM, George Thompson
<george.thompson at nyu.edu> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       George Thompson <george.thompson at NYU.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: Antedating of "Jazz" as Verb
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Wilson Gray recently wrote:
> I'm now a "snowball," as used to(?) be said by whites, a grey-haired old black man.
>
> I see that a just-published biography of Warren Buffet is called "Snowball".
>
> But I suppose the allusion is different.
>
> GAT
>
> George A. Thompson
> Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre", Northwestern Univ. Pr., 1998, but nothing much lately.
>
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All say, "How hard it is that we have to die"---a strange complaint to
come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-----
-Mark Twain

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