dookie

[Jonathan Lighter]

To me, "cop a squat" has also meant merely "to take a seat."

The kind of seat remains unspecified, sooooo......if not a nonce usage, we may have a case of incipient semantic narrowing here.

JL
Wilson Gray <wilson.gray at RCN.COM> wrote:
---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Wilson Gray
Subject: Re: dookie
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

On Sep 24, 2004, at 12:02 AM, Mullins, Bill wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> Sender: American Dialect Society
> Poster: "Mullins, Bill"
> Subject: Re: dookie
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------
> --------
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Laurence Horn
> To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
> Sent: 9/23/2004 7:01 PM
>
>>> "Shit" can be a count noun, too. "Take a shit" for example.
>>> (although "leave a shit" would, strictly speaking, be more accurate)
>>
>> As your last observation indicates, _shit_ isn't *really* a count
>> noun in _take a shit_, or a referential noun at all, but part of a
>> "light verb" construction. Compare _take a shower_, where "the
>> shower" is part of the event, not an entity. Note that (if you
>> share my judgments) no relativization on these non-referential
>> nominals is possible:
>>
>> The shit that the cat left on the floor got on my shoes.
>> ??The shit that you took got stuck in the toilet.
>>
>> but OK:
>> Did the shit that you took make you feel better?
>>
>> --where the event, rather than the product, is referenced. My
>> judgments, anyway--YMMV.
>>
>> larry
>
>
> That being the case (and your argument is persuasive), I wonder why so
> many
> idiomatic synonyms for this action have the same form:
>
> cop a squat

Interesting. When I first heard this in the very early '50's, it meant
only "take a seat." When the character, "Munch," said it to a suspect
on the '90's TV cop show, "Homicide: Life on the Streets," said it to a
suspect, it still meant "take a seat." Clearly, time changes things, to
coin a phrase.

> pinch a loaf
> drop a steamer
> drop a massive
> take a dump

As for this one, I believe that my family and my wife's family share
the copyright.;-)

-Wilson Gray

>

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