Phat [was Re: gay/ghey/ghay]

[Jonathon Green]

No, I didn't mean definition text. I was thinking headwords, and was too
lazy - and too busy dismebowelling the slang citations from a 1953 book
thrillingly subtitled 'Teenagers trapped in waterfront vice!' - to start
checking properly. Jesse is of course right. Although having now checked
the 1737 edn. of Bailey's UEED, I can't actually find 'fuck' therein,
neither in the main text, nor in the Canting addendum, which is generally
seen as coming from the New Canting Dict. of 1725. It is, however, in the
1755 edition, defined coyly as 'foeminam subagitare'. This is the main
text - the addendum had by now been dropped. And while Ash certainly used
it, so too did the Revs. Samuel Johnson and  John Elliott, in their
Selected Pronouncing and Accented Dictionary, published in the US in 1800;
or at least they included _foutra_ 'a low, vulgar word', whiuch inclusion
brought no little criticism, which they attempted to defer by blaming Ash
(in whose work they admitted they had found it - and then had blithely
copied it into their own).

Jonathon Green