"rawhead and crossbones"

[Wilson Gray]

"Bug-bear"? I wonder whether BE _booger-bear_ [bUg@ bA@] "a
physically-unattractive girl or woman" is related to this. The
similarity has never struck me before.

-Wilson

On 8/4/06, Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at YAHOO.COM>
> Subject:      "rawhead and crossbones"
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> This colorful blend, a synonymous with the universally current "skull and crossbones," does not appear in OED.
>
>   1861 Capt. David D. Porter, in D. M. Sullivan _USMC in Civil War_ I  214:  A bottle of corrosive sublimate with rawheads and crossbones all over it.
>
>   The writer was a prominent naval officer (1813-91), born in Chester, Pa.
>
>   Thackeray used the phrase earlier:
>
>   1845 W. M. Thackeray _Irish Sketch-Book_  ch. xvi: Then there is Lombard Street, otherwise called Deadman's Lane, with a raw-head and cross-bones and a "memento mori" over the door where the dreadful tragedy of the Lynches was acted in 1493.
>
>   OED has _rawhead_ solely as "the name of a nursery bug-bear, usually coupled with _bloody-bones_."
>
>   JL
>
>
> ---------------------------------
> Do you Yahoo!?
>  Next-gen email? Have it all with the  all-new Yahoo! Mail Beta.
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>


--
Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have
found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be
imposed upon them.

Frederick Douglass

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org