Heard on The Doctors: _bug juice_

[Jonathan Lighter]

NewspaperArchive and Google Books have a handful of exx.of "mystery meat"
 from the late '40s (usually referring to meat that is actually
"mysterious" for some reason, e.g., glows in the dark, literally of unknown
provenance - human flesh, perhaps? etc.)

The slang term seems not to appear clearly in print until the mid-50's and
isn't commonly recorded till the '70s.

In early use, "mystery" (unrecorded with "meat") referred specifically to
hash.  It seems to have been fairly well known.  But the popularity of a
more inclusive "mystery meat" is much more recent.

JL

On Thu, Mar 15, 2012 at 12:07 PM, Arnold Zwicky <zwicky at stanford.edu> wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Arnold Zwicky <zwicky at STANFORD.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: Heard on The Doctors: _bug juice_
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On Mar 15, 2012, at 8:56 AM, Victor Steinbok wrote:
>
> > Mystery meat is well entrenched in school cafeteria and well before my
> > time. In fact, I suspect that HDAS is off by 20-30 years at least, but I
> > have not investigated.
> >
> >     VS-)
> >
> > On 3/15/2012 11:45 AM, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
> >> "Mystery meat":  HDAS: 1968 (nearly 100 years earlier as plain
> "mystery").
> >>
> >> JL
> >>
> >> On Thu, Mar 15, 2012 at 11:16 AM, Victor Steinbok<aardvark66 at gmail.com
> >wrote:
> >>
> >>> I thought it was "mystery meat"--also used on one of the Top Chef shows
> >>> when the meat was overcooked, making it unidentifiable....
> >>>     VS-)
>
> it was common when i was a freshman at Princeton (1958-59), and i gathered
> that the usage came from prep school usage from some time before.  so, like
> VS, i imagine it could be taken taken back to at least the 1940s.
>
> arnold
>
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