SPLASH or SLASH? [brass tacks]

Fri Nov 23 01:56:06 UTC 2007

The semantics has always seemed vague to me, though not enough to form a basis, in and of itself, for challenging the etymology; meanings do shift.

I wonder why Franklin would have said it was of 19th C origin without any evidence. Maybe we have just not found it yet. Obviously, there was cross-Atlantic  borrowing. Doesn't it seem more likely that it would have started in Cockney than that it ended up in Cockney?
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-----Original Message-----
From: Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at YAHOO.COM>

Date:         Thu, 22 Nov 2007 14:56:58
To:ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject:      Re: [ADS-L] SPLASH or SLASH? [brass tacks]

Nor do I understand the faux lexicographical assumption that _brass tacks_ "really" means "facts."

  JL

Benjamin Zimmer <bgzimmer at BABEL.LING.UPENN.EDU> wrote:
  ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Benjamin Zimmer
Subject: Re: SPLASH or SLASH? [brass tacks]
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

On Nov 22, 2007 4:33 AM, neil wrote:
> > Poster: Jonathan Lighter
> >
> > What is the evidence that "brass tacks" is "rhyming slang" for "facts"?
>
> Julian Franklyns' 'A Dictionary of Rhyming Slang', Routledge, 1960 states
> that it is Cockney rhyming slang [where 'facks', as it would be pronounced,
> then rhymes with 'tacks'].
>
> But then he comments: "Of 19.C origin, it had become naturalized in America
> by 1903, and many people believe it to have been imported here from
> America."

I believe the date to beat for "brass tacks" in the US is 1863:

http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0611A&L=ADS-L&P=R15291

Nothing that early has been found in the UK, which casts the
rhyming-slang origin in serious doubt.

--Ben Zimmer

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