PIGEON = 'sponsee'

[Laurence Horn]

At 11:26 AM -0500 12/12/03, RonButters at AOL.COM wrote:
>Another discussion group has raised the issue of the earliest use of the word
>PIGEON in Alcoholics Anonymous to refer to a person who is 'sponsored' by
>another person in the program (the SPONSOR-SPONSEE relationship is a widely
>recongnized and reifed aspect of the program, e.g., new members of
>the Program are
>strongly encouraged to find a person with long-term sobriety who will act as
>their SPONSOR, a person who will guide them, generally through daily contact,
>through the program).
>
>I believe that this term PIGEON used in this sense is at least 30 years old
>in A.A. in the United States. But apparently does not appear with very great
>frequency in the usual data bases.
>
>In a message dated 12/11/03 7:01:39 PM, someone writes:

That someone was me, both here and on OUTiL.  The same book also
provides this great exchange in which a couple of characters identify
and describe "Austin conditionals" (--so called from J. L. Austin's
discussion of "There are some biscuits on the sideboard if you want
some" in his 1956 paper "Ifs and Cans"; a.k.a. speech act
conditionals).  Wonder if there's an archive of excerpts of
linguistic analysis from novels not related to linguistic analysis?
=========
"John, if you're home, it's Roz. Come to think of it, it's Roz
whether or you're home or not, but are you?"
    She was in the middle of another sentence by the time he got the
phone to his ear. "I've always liked that construction", he said.
"'If I don't see you before you leave, have a nice time.' And if do
see me before then, should I have a lousy time? Odd use of the
conditional, if you think about it."
    "Or even if you don't."

  (Block, _Small Town_, 104)
==========
larry

>
>  This paragraph appears in a novel, Lawrence Block's _Small Town_,
>2003, p. 78), on the same page that also includes the useful lexical
>items "cruisier" ([re Christopher St. in Greenwich Village:] "at this
>hour on this nice a day it would be a little bit cruisier than he
>could stand") and "lesbian bed death".
>
>"The conventional wisdom in AA was that one ought to choose a sponsor
>of one's own sex, to keep sexual tension from undermining the
>relationship. That was fine for straights, but it wasn't that simple
>in gay AA, where the term _pigeon-fucker_ had been coined to label
>sponsors who took sexual advantage of sponsees. (He'd heard the term
>at his first meeting, and thought it was some kinky practice he'd
>somehow missed out on.)"
>
>This was the only occurrence of this form that I could locate on
>either Nexis or google (yes, there were 11 google hits but all seem
>to involve the compositional meaning alluded to in the parenthetical
>from the end of the passage above, as opposed to the idiomatic sense
>defined in the previous sentence).  Granted, the use of "pigeon" for
>a dupe of one sort or another is well-established in slang use, but
>if I'm correctly interpreting the practice of pigeon-fucking to
>require the AA (if not gay AA) context and the establishment of a
>sponsor/sponsee relationship to be exploited, it counts as a
>translucent, if not opaque, compound.