"Butch up"

[Wilson Gray]

It would have helped, if I'd bothered to supply some context. "Butch
up," as I heard it, was used to mean, "show some backbone, be a man,
act like you got a pair, get tough, etc."

-Wilson Gray

On 5/4/05, Benjamin Zimmer <bgzimmer at rci.rutgers.edu> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Benjamin Zimmer <bgzimmer at RCI.RUTGERS.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: "Butch up"
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> 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
>


--
-Wilson Gray