"Butch up"

[Benjamin Zimmer]

On Wed, 4 May 2005 15:53:46 -0400, Alice Faber <faber at HASKINS.YALE.EDU>
wrote:

>Arnold M. Zwicky wrote:
>> 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.

That sense of "butch up" could perhaps be influenced by "buck up", but
it's also reminiscent of the rodeo-ism turned Red Sox rallying cry,
"cowboy up".

What's the earliest we have for "cowboy up", anyway?  N-archive has it
back to 1975:

-----
1975 _Reno Evening Gazette_ (Nev.) 4 Jan. 9/4 "It hurts," he exclaimed,
putting on a pantomime of a clobbered cowboy dragging a game leg away from
a bull wreck. "You're crying. You're bleeding. You're screaming. And
there's Gay [sc. rodeo instructor Don Gay] right behind you saying,
'Cowboy up. Get tough. Get tough.'"
-----


--Ben Zimmer