"puss" in Icelandic ? Swedish ?

[Laurence Horn]

At 1:18 AM -0400 8/30/05, Benjamin Zimmer wrote:
>On Tue, 30 Aug 2005 01:04:24 -0400, Douglas G. Wilson wrote:
>
>>>If it's truly cognate, then it's an incredible survival from Old
>>>English, no ?
>>
>>MW3's etymology for this "fud": <<perhaps of Scandinavian origin; akin to
>>Old Norse _futh_ vulva, Norwegian dialect _fud_ buttocks; akin to Middle
>>High German _vut_ vulva ....>>. Seems reasonable to me. Is/was there a
>>cognate in Old English? I don't know, my OED doesn't give one; but even
>>if there is/was it may not have been an ancestor of modern Scots "fud".
>>I suppose, perhaps naively, that the lineage might be Norse > Scots >
>>Ozarkian, with Anglo-Saxon bypassed.
>>
>>BTW, my OED and MW3 show the "arse" and "[rabbit-]tail" senses but not the
>>"female pudendum" sense.
>
>That sense didn't get added to the OED till 2002, though it's attested
>back to 1771.
>
>-----
>DRAFT ADDITIONS DECEMBER 2002
>
>     fud, n.1
>
>   * Chiefly Sc. The pubic hair (esp. of a woman); cf. sense 2. Also: the
>female genitals. Now coarse slang.
>
>   1771 ‘CLAUDERO’ Hen-peckt Carter in Misc. Prose & Verse 95 Each hair of
>her fud is the length of a span, What fud can compare to the fud of
>Joan? 1835 D. WEBSTER Rhymes 24 Ye could hae seen in curious cases,
>Their bits o' fuds. 1937 E. PARTRIDGE Dict. Slang, Fud, the pubic hair:
>coll. when not Scottish or dial. 1995 D. MCLEAN Bunker Man 23 It really
>looked like the cock was firing off into a big square fud.
>-----
>
I don't think anyone noted the fact that Farmer & Henley include the
"pubic hair" sense (not specifying gender) but not the "genitalia" or
"arse" senses.  They also have the "tail of a hare or rabbit".  One
cite in included, frm Burns:  "They scarcely left to co'er their
fuds" ("The Jolly Beggars").

larry