Go soak your head

[Laurence Horn]

At 9:22 AM -0500 11/14/08, Joel S. Berson wrote:
>Does it make sense to tell someone else to "hit, strike" his own
>head?  My association is with some notion of shame, embarrassment,
>telling the other person to shame or perhaps improve (his head, his
>thinking) by wetting it with something.  But from what curing liquid
>that wetting notion arises from I have no idea.
>
>By the way, I prefer the useful expression "He is now the editor of a
>small, very weakly paper."  :-)   I can easily see an 18th century
>newspaper printer/editor writing that about a rival for whom he has contempt.
>
>Joel

I figured the "very" was thrown in to make it clear "weakly" wasn't
simply a misspelling...

LH

>
>At 11/13/2008 03:32 PM, Cohen, Gerald Leonard wrote:
>>Btw, is this "soak" in the sense "make completely wet" or in the
>>sense "hit, strike"?
>>
>>Gerald Cohen
>>
>>________________________________
>>
>>From: George Thompson, Thu 11/13/2008 9:18 AM
>>
>>It does not seem that the OED has an entry for this very useful expression.
>>
>>         He came out at the Little Drury, as one of the Sequin Opera
>>Corps, was pelted, hissed and hooted off the stage.  ***  He was
>>told to go home and "soak his head," with which he complied. . .
>>.  ***  He is now the editor of a small, very weakly paper.
>>         The Whip and Satirist of New York & Brooklyn, February 19,
>>1842, p. 3, col. 2
>>
>>GAT
>>
>>George A. Thompson
>>Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre",
>>Northwestern Univ. Pr., 1998, but nothing much lately.
>>
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>><http://www.americandialect.org/>
>>
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>
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