M*A*S*H (was Re: More on "moist")

[Jonathan Lighter]

The Army acronym never involved asterisks. Nor did the title of the 1968
novel by "Richard Hooker" on which the movie was based.

Asterisks may have been added in the 1970 paperback reprints - can't recall
for sure.  The 1997 printing, the cover of which is visible at Google Books,
lacks them.

If memory serves, the newspaper ads and theatrical posters, all (?) of which
included the
asterisks, bore the explanatory footnote,   " *Mobile Army Surgical
Hospital."  That's what the asterisks were there for.

JL


On Sun, Aug 9, 2009 at 7:31 PM, Benjamin Zimmer <
bgzimmer at babel.ling.upenn.edu> wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Benjamin Zimmer <bgzimmer at BABEL.LING.UPENN.EDU>
> Subject:      M*A*S*H (was Re: More on "moist")
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On Sun, Aug 9, 2009 at 6:06 PM, Jonathan Lighter<wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >
> >  On Sun, Aug 9, 2009 at 5:23 PM, Joel S. Berson <Berson at att.net> wrote:
> >>
> >> At 8/9/2009 04:53 PM, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
> >> >There was, however, a TV series called _M*A*S*H_, the only word in
> English
> >> >that requires asterisks in its standard orthography.
> >>
> >> Are we forgetting _The Education of H * Y * M * A * N K * A * P * L * A
> *
> >> N_?
> >>
> >> Or does that not qualify because there are spaces between its teeth?
> >
> > Doesn't qualify because it's not one word, just a title that happens to
> > contain two proper nouns, both of which are routinely spelled without the
> > asterisks.
> >
> > Though _M*A*S*H_ obviously can be spelled as _MASH_, that isn't
> _M*A*S*H_.
> > It's something very different: a misspelling of the movie entitled
> _MASH_.
>
> Has asterisked _M*A*S*H_ ever been used to refer to a real-world army
> hospital, or does it only exist in the movie ads and the TV series? I
> checked various dictionaries and didn't see any references to the
> asterisked version in their treatment of the acronym _MASH_.
>
> F*W*I*W, there are various band names that employ asterisks (*NSYNC,
> Quix*o*tic, J*S*T*A*R*S).
>
>
> --Ben Zimmer
>
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