undewater basket weaving (UNCLASSIFIED)

[Laurence Horn]

At 4:02 PM +0000 7/6/10, Charles C Doyle wrote:
>I remember the phrase well (from the early 1960s).  But I could
>never understand why underwater basket-weaving was supposed to seem
>EASY!
>
>--Charlie

Good point.  Maybe it's to stress the abstruse and irrelevant
components of college courses rather than the easy part?  Strangely,
I never wondered about this before.

LH

>________________________________________
>From: American Dialect Society [ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] on behalf of
>Mullins, Bill AMRDEC [Bill.Mullins at US.ARMY.MIL]
>Sent: Tuesday, July 06, 2010 11:44 AM
>
>Boingboing has a post on the phrase "underwater basket weaving":
>
>http://www.boingboing.net/2010/07/05/underwater-basket-we.html
>
>The original post has a N'archive cite from 1960; comments link to a
>Wikipedia article that includes Sam Clement's 1956 cite (without credit
>to Sam).  I found a 1952 cite and posted it in the comments there (we'll
>see if it shows up), and will for posterity's sake include it here:
>
>_Cedar Rapids [IA] Gazette_, 3/6/1952, p 13 col 1
>
>"Other slangy speech and patter which came as a surprise to our panel of
>experts were: "Moose" and "crocodile" as nicknames for an unpopular
>girl, "ample samples" making reference to a well-liked food, and
>"underwater basket weaving" as a way of saying that a certain course at
>school is a snap."
>
>Google books has what appears to be a 1953 cite from the Michiganensean,
>the yearbook of the Univ. of Michigan.  E-yearbooks.com has this in
>their archive, but I don't have an account there to check it.
>
>A related cite:
>_Yale Daily News_ 3/1/1941 p 2 col 2
>"For it must be known that Cindy had spent so much time doing her
>roommates' Basket Weaving that she had trouble with her own work."
>Context indicates this is a synonym for Home Ec.
>
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