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

[Jonathan Lighter]

The "butthole" strip also appears in the Janesville (Wis.) Daily Gazette,
Apr. 2, 1947, p. 12.

A search of NewspArch for "Archie" on the previous day, Apr. 1, 1947, finds
no other paper carrying the strip.



JL

On Wed, May 9, 2012 at 10:54 AM, Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com>wrote:

> HDAS has "butt" in the apposite sense back to 1720 and in the U.S. from
> about a hundred years later. The gap may or may not be of significance.
>
> As I suggested upthread, OED does an inadequate job on this one.  What
> little evidence there is suggests currency in the U.S. was primarily in the
> South and Midland.  Possibly (conjecturing wildly here) it began to
> circulate more widely during the Civil War, as men from all over the
> country were thrown together (though not nearly so much as in the World
> Wars: regiments were still organized state by state).
>
> JL
>
>
> On Wed, May 9, 2012 at 10:41 AM, 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: 1947 citing in Archie Comic of "butthole." What did it
>> mean?
>>
>> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> On May 9, 2012, at 10:32 AM, Amy West wrote:
>>
>> > 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?
>>
>> 1 the thicker end (of anything)…; specif.
>> a. a buttock
>>
>> LH
>>
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>>
>
>
>
> --
> "If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."
>



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"If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."

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