cream-puff inhaler; cake-eater

[Jonathan Lighter]

Check HDAS for "creampuff" as, among other things, a used car in splendid
condition.

JL

On Mon, Jun 25, 2012 at 12:50 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu>wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: cream-puff inhaler; cake-eater
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Very versatile, these creampuffs.  I remember learning another sense =
> from our realtor back in the 80s:  a "creampuff" in the housing market =
> is the opposite of a "handyman special", i.e. a house in good condition, =
> on which the buyer will need to make relatively few repairs.  Curiously, =
> this sense isn't in the OED 30 years later (or actually 28, as I know =
> from our state-of-the-mortgage), but there are hundreds of thousands of =
> google hits for "creampuff" + "real estate".  The OED entry is confined =
> to=20
>
> also fig. and transf., as  (a) see quot. 1919 [a shell-burst, WWI];  (b) =
> something of small consequence;  (c) an effeminate person.
>
>
>
> LH
>
> On Jun 25, 2012, at 12:14 PM, Garson O'Toole wrote:
>
> > Jonathan Lighter wrote:
> >>=20
> >> Sounds like BS to me.
> >>=20
> >> A "cake-eater" was a "softy" of a sort easily imagined as attending
> >> afternoon teas, a common university activity of the era. Moreover,
> >> red-blooded he-men were expected to eat muscle-building steaks and
> >> fresh-caught trout, not sweet, debilitating cakes and pastries.
> >>=20
> >> As for "creampuff-inhaler," I too would like to see evidence for its
> >> independent existence.
> >=20
> > Here is an example illustrating the transformative effects of eating
> > cream puffs. The consumer becomes a "cylindrical, roly-poly type of
> > the cities."
> >=20
> > Cite: Circa 1910, The Invaders: A Story of the "Hole-in-the-wall"
> > Country  by John Lloyd [Jacque Lloyd Morgan] Page 227, R.F. Fenno &
> > Company, New York. (Google Books full view)
> >=20
> > =
> http://books.google.com/books?id=3DzfwdAAAAMAAJ&q=3D%22cream+puffs%22#v=3D=
> snippet&
> >=20
> > [Begin excerpt]
> > I can think of nothing more effective than a generation or so on Fifth
> > Avenue, where, according to your old night-hawk friend, Boston Bill,
> > "they eat cream puffs all day long, and drink wine all night"-truly a
> > scathing denunciation of the ultra-rich. It may have been that such
> > enervating luxuries have transformed the western jaw into the eastern
> > chin (I would mark Algernon O'Houlihan as "Exhibit A"), and it may
> > have been this same damnable cream-puff vice that has evolved our
> > tall, gaunt, angular, thin-bellied forebears into the short,
> > cylindrical, roly-poly type of the cities.
> > [End excerpt]
> >=20
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