a missing "eephus"

[Benjamin Zimmer]

Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU> wrote:
>
>I'm sure Dickson has a representative entry for the word. But
>there's absolutely nothing in either the OED or AHD4. To give a sense
>of its frequency, there are 204 Nexis hits (22 from the New York
>Times alone, between 1981 and the present) and 4740 google hits. A
>curiously large number, including today's, use upper-case.

Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at YAHOO.COM> wrote:
>
>Check HDAS 1.  (It's Expert Recommended ! ! ! )

Best to have both Dickson *and* HDAS on hand. Dickson has an entry for
"eephus" and explains its origin in a 1942 exhibition game between
Pittsburgh and Detroit in which Pittsburgh pitcher Rip Sewell threw his
famous "blooper ball" and then christened it the "eephus". No first cite
given -- Dickson quotes Sewell's later retelling of the incident in the
1981 _Boston Globe_. HDAS for its part gives the spelling only as "ephus",
with cites back to Sept. 10, 1943 in _Yank_.

I find "ephus" from Aug. 12, 1943 (_The Sporting News_) and "eephus" from
Sep. 8, 1943 (an AP story in several papers on N-archive).

As both Dickson and HDAS note, "(e)ephus" had an earlier slang usage
meaning '(the) truth, dope'. HDAS has that from 1935.


--Ben Zimmer