"soft baked"; and "no great kicks"

Laurence Horn laurence.horn at YALE.EDU
Fri Jul 23 17:29:54 UTC 2010


At 1:06 PM -0400 7/23/10, Garson O'Toole wrote:
>An edition of Farmer and Henley in 1905 connects half-baked and soft-baked.
>
>1905 "A Dictionary of Slang and Colloquial English: Abridged from the
>seven volume work entitled Slang and its Analogues" by John S. Farmer
>and W. E. Henley, George Routledge & Sons Limited, London.
>
>Half-baked (or Soft-baked). Half-
>witted, cracked, soft (q.v.), doughy
>(q.v.), half-rocked (q.v.): Fr., n'avoir
>pas la tete bien cuite (1825)

P.S.  The four cites given in the unabridged version under this entry
are all for "half-baked", not for "soft-baked" and, as I noted
earlier, the "soft" entry has nothing baked in it.  (I assume the
'simpleton, foolish' sense of "soft" itself likely represent the
"soft-headed" metaphor rather than the "soft-baked" one.)

>
>http://books.google.com/books?id=kOU_AAAAYAAJ&q=soft-baked#v=snippet&

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