Heard on "Law & Order: CI"

[Jonathan Lighter]

I don't doubt it for a minute, though I can't prove it.

  Charlie does provide me, however, with an opportunity to place a vigorous, vaguely related quotation on record, although, incredibly, I can find no Googlits.

  The story begins waaay back in World War One when, according to memoirists, drill sergeants used the catch phrase, "When I say 'Eyes right !' I want to hear those eyeballs click !"

  Creative, _non_?  Now fast-forward to 2005 when Larry Heinemann recounted the following in  _Black Virgin Mountain_ (N.Y.: Doubleday), regarding to his army training at Fort Knox, Ky., in 1966 (p. 13) :

  "We would listen as the WAC sergeant major, a large, thick woman, walked to the front of her formation and said in a large, operatic alto voice with plenty of coloratura oomph, 'When I call attention, I want to hear four hundred pussies go _woof_.' "

  JL

Charles Doyle <cdoyle at UGA.EDU> wrote:
  ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Charles Doyle
Subject: Re: Heard on "Law & Order: CI"
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

This is (probably) unrelated: In the documentary series "Girls Gone Wild" (I am told), the interviewees, having successfully elucidated their torsos, are then invited to disclose their "kitty cats." Is that a playful ad hoc variant of (and euphemism for) slang "pussy"--or maybe an anatomical synecdoche based on slang "kitty" in the sense of "young woman" (HDAS, kitty n.2)? Does this application of the phrase "kitty cat" have an existence outside the show?

--Charlie
_____________________________________________

---- Original message ----
>Date: Wed, 25 Oct 2006 19:43:14 -0400
>From: Wilson Gray
>Subject: Heard on "Law & Order: CI"
>To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
>
>"He liked to dress in women's clothes - panties, bra - the whole _kit_."
>
>The whole _kit_?!
>
>Perhaps the speaker was a Brit doing a dashed good job of faking an Amurk'n accent. But don't actors have to follow a script?
>
>-Wilson

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



---------------------------------
Get your own web address for just $1.99/1st yr. We'll help. Yahoo! Small Business.

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