Not in HDAS? _brumsky_

Wilson Gray hwgray at GMAIL.COM
Sun Jun 12 02:16:20 UTC 2011


On Sat, Jun 11, 2011 at 8:22 PM, Jonathan Lighter
<wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> New to me, Wilson.

If that be true, I'm going to pat myself on the back!;-) Even the most
casual examination of the data in HDAS usually reveals an astounding
historical depth WRT to an annoying number of my favorite, supposedly
if-you-ain't-black-you-don't-know-this-one slang.

Another FWIW: IMO, _brumsky_ isn't of black origin. The _brumsky_
thing is a hapax, IME. I heard it once - well, I heard it other times
when he was telling it to the other guys - from another black Catholic
who was also attending a for-all-practical-purposes-lily-white
Catholic high school in Saint Louis. (William Cullen McBride - "The
Paddies" - High School. It has a W:pedia page.)

_Motorboating_, IME, is the more widely-used term, though though
experience is limited to variants of films of the "Porky's" school.
Garrett ("I lak a gal wif a big butt") Morris and Sir Mix-A-Lot speak
for several generations of those referred to by Richard Prior as "the
*real* soul-brother."

OT: For some reason, posters to UD seem to have a great love of the
phrase, "bent out of shape." I'm mildly surprised, since it's so old.
HDAS has it in print from 1965. I have it anecdotally from 1960 at the
Army Language School, where it was a catch-phrase of Gregor McCurdy's,
the same person who introduced me to "How ADJ is that?", who tried to
persuade me that _scarf_ "eat" is a hypercorrection of _scoff_ "id.",
and who was shocked! *Shocked*! to hear, "Git _you_ a tray!"
--
-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

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