Fwd: retro "psych"

[Benjamin Zimmer]

On Sun, 24 Apr 2005 21:01:12 -0700, Arnold M. Zwicky
<zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU> wrote:

>first, an exchange between me and larry horn:
>
>Begin forwarded message:
>
>> From: Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu>
>> Date: April 8, 2005 7:51:15 AM PDT
>> To: "Arnold M. Zwicky" <zwicky at csli.stanford.edu>
>> Subject: Re: retro "psych"
>>
>> At 6:10 AM -0700 4/8/05, Arnold M. Zwicky wrote:
>>> my Stanford student Tommy Grano reports a use of retro "psych", used
>>> like retro "not" (by conveying 'I just psyched you out').  this was
>>> when he was in grade school in Santa Barbara, ca. 1992, and the kids
>>> didn't continue the usage through later years.
>>>
>>> have you heard of this, or was it (as is entirely possible) just a
>>> short-lived local fad in a very small language community?  if it had
>>> more general use, it might be worth mentioning on ADS-L.
>>>
>> It's real.  I remember it, but mostly from TV shows, as I recall, not
>> real life.  Maybe it really was specifically Californian, including
>> Hollywood productions.
[...]
>has this made it into anybody else's files?

Oh sure, it was quite common in the '80s and early '90s, even among East
Coast kids.  Connie Eble's _Slang and Sociability_ has it:

-----
p. 66:
College students' fondness for juxtaposing appearance and reality is show
in their use of a sentence pattern in which a statement presented as fact
is immediately retracted by the use of a word like _fake_ or _psych_, as
in "Your econ prof phoned -- she wants to see you. Fake!" A similar
structure to indicate negation -- adding _not_ after a statement said in a
serious tone -- became immensely popular during 1990-91 because of its use
on the "Wayne's World" skit on the television program _Saturday Night
Live_...
-----
p. 93:
In its placement after a seemingly serious declarative sentence and in its
effect on meaning, _not_ is similar to _psych!_ made popular by Eddie
Murphy in the mid-1980s.
-----

I don't remember associating it with Eddie Murphy, but apparently he used
it in _Delirious_, a 1983 video of his stand-up routine...

-----
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0085474/board/nest/14637777
"You want some ice cream"
"You want to eat some of my ice cream. But...."
"You wanna lick?"
"PSYCHE!"
-----

Surely it's much older than that.  I'd wager it goes back to the '60s.


--Ben Zimmer