"snap"

[Benjamin Zimmer]

On Tue, Apr 7, 2009 at 4:41 PM, Mark Mandel <thnidu at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> My wife, a librarian with a long exposure to children's and young adult
> books, says that she's seen it in older British books but with a very
> different usage, analogous to the "bread and butter!" of our childhood, used
> when two people say the same thing simultaneously. (Among children only?)
> This would seem unrelated.

See OED2 for this usage, with cites back to 1890. (Def: "The call in the
card-game snap (SNAP n. 5d); hence as an exclamation used when two similar
objects turn up or two similar events take place.")


--Ben Zimmer

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