PU -- and Mexican drinks

[Beverly Flanigan]

Come to think of it, "pew" was the more common form in my childhood, with
"P.U." a slower exaggerated form.  Now "pew" looks more like "phew", so I
looked up the latter in my (old) dictionary, and it cites "fu, fyoo" as
"conventionalized pronun."  This might suggest an earlier oral form closer
to our childhood pronun., which was then spelled artificially, with
subsequent spelling pronunciation.  No source word is given, but the
definition is all-encompassing: "an exclamation expressing disgust,
surprise, relief, etc."  I generally think of "phew" as only an expression
of relief (sort of whistled); adding disgust gets it closer to our "pew/P.U."


At 04:24 AM 10/27/99 -0500, you wrote:
>Bapopik at AOL.COM wrote:
> >
> > P.U.
> >
> >    I don´t recall seeing P.U. before the turn of the century.  I do >
> recall seeing it in some cartoons--maybe Billy DeBeck´s Barney Google >
> and Snuffy Smith?
>
>At last the secret is out -- Barry was around before the turn of the
>century!  No wonder he's so good at finding antedates . . .
>
>I'm not (quite) that old myself, but I can attest to "P.U." (alt: "pew")
>in use to indicate an unpleasant odor in Chicago and Milwaukee, early
>1940s.  As for Pepe le Pew, I thought that was a deliberate bilingual
>pun from the beginnning.