Russian racehorses, Cooter Brown, fast foxes, theft

[Dennis R. Preston]

Damn Arnold stole it from me. I call them "real people" (even in print).

dInIs

>> 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


Dennis R. Preston
Department of Linguistics and Languages
Michigan State University
East Lansing MI 48824-1027 USA
preston at pilot.msu.edu
Office: (517)353-0740
Fax: (517)432-2736