"Butch up"

[Alice Faber]

Arnold M. Zwicky 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".

Interesting...On the newsgroup alt.support.diet.low-carb, "butch up" is
generally used by some posters to mean something like "buckle down and
do what you know you *should* do". Searching in google groups gives
about 300 hits for this. Searching usenet as a whole seems to give more
usages consistent with what Arnold reports; the first page of hits gives
two snippets, from different groups, in which people seem to be asking
what others mean by the phrase. Usage seems to be concentrated in the
groups rec.music.makers.percussion and misc.fitness.weights, with
between-groups differences.


--
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Alice Faber                                    faber at haskins.yale.edu
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