Swats was RE: adjective "Christian"

[Jonathan Lighter]

OED has "paddywhack," as "a severe beating, a violent blow" from an English dial. source as recent as 1898.  "Paddywhack" was another of my grandmother's words, from NYC about 1895 or a little later. It must be significantly older than that in American use.

As I heard it, it was a punitive swat with the hand on a child's rear end, certainly not a "severe beating" or "violent blow."

And certainly its use was at least influenced by "paddle," if not descended directly from (unattested?) "paddle whack."

OED also instances the song "This Old Man" from the 1920s.  Neither grandparent was familiar with this when I brought it home from school about 1958.

JL



Katy Miller <kmiller at BIB-ARCH.ORG> wrote:
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Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Katy Miller
Subject: Swats was RE: adjective "Christian"
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OH, these posts have brought back some awful, painful memories.
Absolutely no way on God's green earth can those things be called
Christian.

I am (well my buttocks are) all too familiar with that "footlong piece
of wood [that] hung on every classroom wall like a symbol...." of
sadism.

And it wasn't a foot long either, that's way too short to inflict the
kind of damage that's intended. Damned baseball coach/American history
teacher drilled holes in his, said it made it more aerodynamic. It had
to be two feet long.

We called 'em "swats." And almost never as a verb, just a noun. "You're
gonna get swats" or "How many swats you get for that?" I don't remember
any specific word for the paddle itself.


Katy

Oh and ps. This was in HIGH SCHOOL. Seminole, TX circa 1986.

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