Antedating of Safire and OED on "Slam Dunk"

[David Bowie]

From:    Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
: At 10:30 AM -0400 6/12/04, Fred Shapiro wrote:
:: On Sat, 12 Jun 2004, Dennis R. Preston wrote:

:::  Could "West Unself" be "Wes Unseld" in disguise?

:: The original said "West Unseld," actually.  I'm not sure where the
:: "t" in "West" came from.

: It came via assimilation from the res(t) of the sentence:

<snip>

: The context appears to have been the annual NBA all-star game between
: the West(ern Conference), including Jerry West of the L.A. Lakers and
: Lew Alcindor (of the Milwaukee Bucks at the time, later Kareem Abdul
: Jabbar of the Lakers), and the East(ern Conference), including Wes
: Unseld of the Washington Bullets.   The Kennebec Journal just
                ^^^^^^^^^^ ^^^^^^^
: assimilated poor Wes Unseld to all those  Wests.

Erm, that'd be the *Baltimore* Bullets. Once i learned that the Bullets had
started out in Baltimore, the name made more sense to me--alliteration and
all that.

Of course, now they're the Washington Wizards, in a desperate attempt to
keep the alliteration. My favorite name for the team, though, is the
Washington Buzzards, keeping bits of both names, which (making this,
astonishingly enough, on-topic for the list) i've even seen in print--one of
Tony Kornheiser's columns in the Washington _Post_, IIRC, though it might
have been Mike Wilbon.

David Bowie                                         http://pmpkn.net/lx
    Jeanne's Two Laws of Chocolate: If there is no chocolate in the
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