"dished" = tired

[Jonathan Lighter]

Thanks, George, for another valuable find.

JL

George Thompson <george.thompson at NYU.EDU> wrote:
---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: George Thompson
Subject: "dished" = tired
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Another morsel from James Kirke Paulding:

"At Six we started for New York, where we arrived at the Seven in the Evening, looking as much like two vagabonds, as any two Gentlemen you wish to see in a summer's day -- fatigued, jaded, and in short to use a new phrase, completely 'dished.'"

>From a letter of 1801, as cited in Ralph M. Aderman & Wayne R. Kime, Advocate for America: The Life of James Kirke Paulding, Selingrove: Susquehanna U. Pr., 2003, p. 32 and footnote 23, p. 344. The footnote cites a collection of Paulding's letters edited by Aderman in 1962, which is not on the shelf here today.

HDAS has citations for this sense of dished from English sources dated 1788, 1797 & 1811; its frist citation from an American source is 1821. So this is by 20 years an antedating of the knowledge in America of this word from English slang.

GAT

George A. Thompson
Author of A Documentary History of "The African
Theatre", Northwestern Univ. Pr., 1998.


---------------------------------
Do you Yahoo!?
vote.yahoo.com - Register online to vote today!