buttkiss vs. Butkus, ignorance of

[Laurence Horn]

At 5:37 PM -0700 5/30/05, Arnold M. Zwicky wrote:
>On May 15, 2005, at 1:53 AM, Rex W. Stocklin inventoried a big pile
>of errors:
>
>>  - (N.B. - I swear this is as real as all these others) Younger
>>sports fans don't know buttkiss...
>
>this is a really heterogeneous collection, with non-standard
>variants, common misspellings, nonce misspellings, malapropisms of
>several kinds, etc.
>
>but in there are at least two possible eggcorns: "chewy nugget" and
>"don't know buttkiss".
>
On the latter, I'm surprised we don't have "don't know butkus", the
assumption being that anyone ignorant enough (especially around
Chicago) to be unfamiliar with the immortal Bears linebacker Dick
Butkus is clearly hopeless.

Let's check...AHA!  Two sightings of "don't know butkus":

...only demonstrates, like much of your other responses to the
prior email, that you don't know butkus about cost accounting

I read the FAQ and after trolling these
boards for months I still don't know butkus about the race war.


At least I can imagine a possible, if etymythological, story for how
not to know Butkus could end up meaning, well, not to know bupkes.
It's much harder (at least for me) to figure out how that might have
happened with "don't know buttkiss".

--Larry