"Butch up"

[Benjamin Zimmer]

On Tue, 3 May 2005 18:26:05 -0700, Arnold M. Zwicky
<zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU> wrote:

>On May 3, 2005, at 4:43 PM, Wilson Gray wrote:
>
>> This is something that I heard for the first time, today. However,
>> according to a post to the Double-Tongued Word-Wrester Dictionary: A
>> Growing Dictionary of Old and New Words From the Fringes of English
>> <http://www.doubletongued.org/>, it dates back to at least the movie,
>> Die Hard With A Vengeance.
>
>i don't find it on this site, at least as an entry.  grant, you there?
>
>but this one's been around a while in gay male circles.  "butch up"
>your behavior, clothes, decor, etc., or just "butch it up": act
>conventionally masculine (to conceal your homosexuality, to avoid
>alienating people, whatever).  i'm away from my relevant sources, but
>i'm pretty sure it goes back a few decades at least.  it's an
>entirely natural development from the adjective "butch".

The Broadway musical version of _La Cage aux Folles_ and the movie
adaptation _The Birdcage_ probably introduced this sense of "butching (it)
up" to many straight audiences.

But I wonder when the expression moved out of gay circles to refer to
masculinization/defeminization more generally.  HDAS has cites from the
'70s for "butch" = '(of a woman) mannish' if that's any indication.

Here are two cites from the '80s...

-----
1985 _Guardian_ (London) 28 May (Nexis) You must make special efforts to
catch her attention. Try some sexy surprises - wear a cosy woolly cardi
that brings out the boy in you, just the thing to play smacky lips and
huggy bear. Cook something sexy, husky and he-man. Butch up your little
world, schmuck.
-----
1988 _Tradeswomen_ (San Francisco) 31 Oct. 51 (Proquest) Over the next
several months I studied hard, asked a lot of questions, butched-up even
more than usual (a feat thought by some to be impossible) and began
pulling a share of the teaching load.
[written by a female auto mechanic who became a trades teacher]
-----

Notably, "butch up" could refer to getting a "butch" haircut as early as
1957...

-----
1957 _New York Times_ 4 Aug. (Magazine) 9/1 It is difficult to pinpoint
the exact date at which the military haircut became both cause celebre and
a source of humor. ... The newest example, of course, is Airman Donald
Wheeler, who refused to get himself butched up and got away with it.
-----


--Ben Zimmer