1947 citing in Archie Comic of "butthole." What did it mean?

Amy West medievalist at W-STS.COM
Wed May 9 14:32:01 UTC 2012


On 5/9/12 12:01 AM, Automatic digest processor wrote:
> Date:    Tue, 8 May 2012 20:41:39 -0300
> From:    "David A. Daniel"<dad at POKERWIZ.COM>
> Subject: Re: 1947 citing in Archie Comic of "butthole." What did it mean?
>
> So, there I was last night watching Big Bang Theory, the episode with
> Stephen Hawking in it. At the end he is telling Sheldon that his (Sheldon's)
> findings on the Higgs Boson particle are wrong. He says there is an
> arithmetic mistake on page 2, "quite the boner," he says. This, of course,
> would have sent Jake - over at Two and a Half Men - into hysterics: "Hawking
> said boner!"
<snip>
> So you see where I am
> winding tortuously my way to: As Baker, John says below, Montana almost
> certainly used butthole innocuously, secondary meanings being secondary, in
> the manner of Hawking's boner (heheh).
> DAD
> PS: If "Hawking's Boner" comes to mean public use of a word that has both an
> innocent and a rude meaning, I claim it. I suppose it could also be called
> an "Archie's Butthole." Anyone want to claim that one?
In fact, when I was talking to my "wicked smaht" friend he used "boner"
as an example of a term used in comics (he mentioned Batman
specifically) with dual meanings: innocuous and not.

I checked my OED1 and while there is no entry for "butt" to mean the
buttocks -- which surprised me --  there are plenty of entries meaning
bottom of something or rump, and so while there may be no explicit entry
showing "butt" as a slang term for a human bottom at that point in time,
certainly it's within the semantic field, and certainly young boys will
turn an innocuous term into a "dirty" one just for giggles. ("Is I. P.
Freely there?")

Has anyone checked W2?

---Amy West

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