Christmas Eve Antedating : "Humbug"

[Wilson Gray]

On Sat, Jul 31, 2010 at 7:19 PM, Bonnie Taylor-Blake
<taylor-blake at nc.rr.com> wrote:
> On Christmas Eve, 2009, Fred Shapiro offered us:
>
>> humbug (OED 1751)

For real, I ain't hardly tryin' t' humbug y'all uh nuthin', but I
wonder why it is that _humbug_ has been so alive and kicking in BE, as
both noun and verb, that after I'd heard Basil Rathbone's

"Bah! [?]!"

it was years before I realized that the second word was "Humbug!" I'd
never heard that word used as merely an exclamation before. It sounds
like "humbug," but it can't be. "Humbug" ain't no exclamation. I ain't
tellin' y'all this on no humbug, neither.

-Wilson



--
-Wilson
–––
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

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