binky

[Baker, John]

        My wife, from eastern Massachusetts, has this, and I was initially
mystified.  It turns out that Binky is a registered trademark for pacifiers,
currently owned, I believe, by Playtex Products, and apparently used since
1935.

John Baker


> -----Original Message-----
> From: George Thompson [SMTP:george.thompson at NYU.EDU]
> Sent: Saturday, December 29, 2001 12:33 PM
> To:   ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
> Subject:      binky
>
> My wife calls my attention to Bill Gallo's cartoon in the Daily News of
> December 23, 2001, p. 82.  In the lower right corner of the drawing is
> a diapered baby, with a pacifier in its mouth.  There is a label
> reading "binky, the ol' reliable" and an arrow pointing to the pacifier.
>
> This caught my wife's attention because her mother had called
> pacifiers "binkies".  I've never heard the word and don't find it in
> the usual dictionaries.  DARE has (1) "any little mechanical
> contrivance" from 1912 and (2) as the answer to the question "the part
> of the body that you sit on", 1968.
>
> The lamented mother-in-law was born in southwestern Penn. in about 1904
> to a family with roots there of several generations, and she lived
> there all of her life.  I know that Bill Gallo is a New Yorker old
> enough to have been in the marines during WWII, and his last name
> suggests to me that he is not Scots Presbyterian.
>
> GAT
>
> George A. Thompson
> Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre", Northwestern
> Univ. Pr., 1998.
>
>
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