Russian racehorses, Cooter Brown, fast foxes

[Lynne Murphy]

> From:         Arnold Zwicky <zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU>
> ordinary people just *hate* to hear this idea.  there's an expression
> "friend of dorothy" meaning 'homosexual person', there has to have
> been a dorothy who was associated with homosexuals.  (alan berube
> reports in Coming Out Under Fire that the fbi believed so deeply in
> this idea that they spent some significant resources trying to track
> down homosexuals by searching for the elusive dorothy.)  but there's
> no reason to assume this at all, any more than there's reason to think
> that generic vocatives like "joe" and "mac" had to originate as
> references to specific men with these names.  all that had to happen
> was for someone to pick "dorothy" as a name that sounded plausible as
> the name of a [note use of subcultural technical term] fag hag and
> then use it with acquaintances in a coded reference to homosexuality.
>
> my inclination is to think that there's a lot more individual
> creativity in language use than most folks credit, so i'm more than
> a bit wary about starting a search for the real-life (or fictional)
> dorothy or miss mamie johnson.

OK, but isn't Dorothy pretty well understood as a _Wizard of Oz_
reference?  Perhaps that was not the original Dorothy (we can't know),
but I'd guess that it's part of the reason for the phrase's success.
That and the parallelism with "Friend of Bill (W)".

I love, Arnold, how you contrast us here with "ordinary people."

Extraordinarily,
Lynne



Dr M Lynne Murphy
Lecturer in Linguistics
School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

phone +44-(0)1273-678844
fax   +44-(0)1273-671320