Stanley Crouch ...

[Jonathan Lighter]

My suggestion of Wolof was (atypically) only partly facetious. Since basic
sexual terms of this sort tend to be quite old, {booty/boody} might well be
a rare pre-slavery survival, particularly since it is well attested as far
back as the 1920s, if not a decade earlier (see HDAS), and few white
speakers were familiar with it till recent years.

Have I already tell the story of the senior professor who asked me, only
five or six years ago, if I knew why students laughed and looked
astonishe when he told them that early explorers "were only interested in
booty"?

A derivation from "body" is conceivable, but the vowel shift would be
unusual (I think).

But "botty"? Naaaaaah.

JL

On Mon, Jun 15, 2009 at 9:56 AM, Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com> wrote:

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> Poster:       Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Re: Stanley Crouch ...
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> I can understand that, since there are hundreds of examples of a clear
> [t]-pronunciation to be heard among any group of free-range (no white
> people present) BE-speakers. I term this phenomenon "emphatic
> devoicing," since it - the devoicing of the underlying /d/ - normally
> occurs when the pronunciation is emphasized. Of course, as far as I
> can tell, off the top of my head at, at least for me, the crack of
> dawn, when I'm not fully awake, there's nothing more than my personal
> analysis of the facts to prevent the mirror-image of this argument
> from applying: the underlying /t/ appears under emphasis.
>
> However, there are other examples that can be found, only in my
> memory, unfortunately, that can be said to support my analysis. For
> example, there's a song that begins with a woman saying to her man:
>
> "I'm leavin' you, dat-ty!" [d& tI]
>
> Unfortunately, I heard this song something a half-century ago and
> there's not much hope of my being able to track it down. If it wasn't
> for the woman's pronunciation of "daddy" as "datty" (the rest of the
> song is of no interest: the man begging her not to leave) I probably
> wouldn't remember  anything of this song at all.
>
> As coincidence would have it, last evening, on some cop-show re-run, I
> believe it was, a non-American black speaker says, abstracting away
> from his foreign accent, to the token white, female cop, "You have a
> nice body." But, what he said *could* have been understood as, "You
> have a nice _boody_." were it not for the fact that the speaker hadn't
> had a chance to see the woman's arse, as the scene was staged.
>
> I found that interesting, but, of course, not probative - or even
> indicative - in any useful sense. The black speaker was a foreigner in
> the context of the show, but he very well could have been some random
> actor from Marshall, Texas, in real life, for all that I know! :-)
>
> -Wilson
>
> On Sun, Jun 14, 2009 at 7:59 PM, Jonathan Lighter<wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
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> > Sender: Â  Â  Â  American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> > Poster: Â  Â  Â  Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at GMAIL.COM>
> > Subject: Â  Â  Â Re: Stanley Crouch ...
> >
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> >
> > Not only does the OED prefer {booty}, it tells us that it's "Prob.
> [_sic_]
> > an altered form of _botty_ *n."*
> > **
> > Except that "botty" is a nursery euphemism recorded it till recently, it
> > would seem, only in the works of English writers. The 1924 ex., from the
> > English novelist Ronald Firbank, is in BE, but the BE of a fictional
> > country. Â (Firbank had originally titled his book _Sorrow in Sunlight_,
> but
> > his U.S. publisher (Brentano's) thought they'd sell more under the title
> > _Prancing Nigger_. Â It is said that W.E.B DuBois enjoyed the book
> despite
> > its American title.
> >
> > HDAS, under the pressure of numbers, went with {booty} as the lemma,
> though
> > {boody} is cross-referenced to it. I suppose SE "booty" could well be the
> > etymon, but so might something nobody's yet thought of. Â Wolof?
> >
> > JL
> >
> >
> > On Sun, Jun 14, 2009 at 6:13 PM, Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> >> -----------------------
> >> Sender: Â  Â  Â  American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> >> Poster: Â  Â  Â  Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM>
> >> Subject: Â  Â  Â Stanley Crouch ...
>  >>
> >>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------=
> > ------
> >>
> >> is the name of the author who has used in print the spelling "boody,"
> >> preferred by this writer, in place of the unfortunately probably
> >> now-standard spelling, "booty," which, among other things, falls
> >> together with "booty" in the pirate sense and in other senses (is
> >> anyone else familiar with the food product named, My Sister's Booty?)
> >>
> >> The reviewer in the NYTBR *sic*-ed "boody." It took me about a week to
> >> get that it was the spelling to which the *sic* referred, _boody_
> >> having been my mental image of the spelling of the term since I was
> >> about five years old.
> >>
> >> Of course, this is hardly the only time that a BE obscenity has been
> >> reduced to an ordinary, everyday term in standard English, cf. "hit
> >> that (ass)," "tap that (ass)," most recently. There was even a
> >> commericial in which a *woman* says about a passing man, "I could
> >> _hit_ that." Aaarrrggghhh!!!
> >>
> >> Though The Who don't mention it, a good reason to die before you get
> >> old is to avoid having to feel the language shift under your feet.
> >>
> >> BTW, to give the devil his - well, history its - due, The Bootery, the
> >> name of a former Saint Louis shoe store, was good for a chuckle
> >> amongst colored kids, even back in the day.
> >> --
> >> -Wilson
> >> =96=96=96
> >> All say, "How hard it is that we have to die"---a strange complaint to
> >> come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
> >> -----
> >> -Mark Twain
> >>
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> >>
> >
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> > The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
> >
>
>
>
> --
> -Wilson
> –––
>  All say, "How hard it is that we have to die"---a strange complaint to
> come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
> -----
> -Mark Twain
>
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> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>

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