a missing "eephus"

[Robert Fitzke]

As a kid I remember a comic strip in which, as I recall, kids played
baseball. One of the kids, a girl I think, was a pitcher with an eephus
ball, an extremely unhittable pitch. To the best of my recollection this
would have been in the mid to late thirties (I'm now 79 so memory
reliability is not what it was). The strip would have been in either the
Battle Creek MI Enquirer and News or the long since defunct Battle Creek
Moon Journal.

Bob
----- Original Message -----
From: "Benjamin Zimmer" <bgzimmer at RCI.RUTGERS.EDU>
To: <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
Sent: Wednesday, July 06, 2005 8:31 AM
Subject: Re: a missing "eephus"


> 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
>