Wuss; Clothes horse

[Fred Shapiro]

On Tue, 1 Feb 2000, Greg Austin wrote:

> This is rediculous blindness to reality.  Almost anyone growing up in the
> 60's remembers hearing and using the term, regardless of when someone first
> documented its use in print, it was in very common usage in the mid '60's, at
> least by people my age.

I'm not disagreeing with the validity of what you say.  I will make two
points, however.  First, people's recollections of word-usage, even
strongly asserted recollections, are often confused.  Second, I was a
teenager in the late 60s and early 70s, but never heard this word until
the late 70s or early 80s.


Fred R. Shapiro                             Coeditor (with Jane Garry)
Associate Librarian for Public Services     TRIAL AND ERROR: AN OXFORD
  and Lecturer in Legal Research            ANTHOLOGY OF LEGAL STORIES
Yale Law School                             Oxford University Press, 1998
e-mail: fred.shapiro at yale.edu               ISBN 0-19-509547-2