CANDY and JUNK

[Arnold Zwicky]

On Mar 15, 2009, at 10:00 AM, Ron Butters wrote:

>
> I THOUGHT I'd mentioned this a number of years ago, but a check of the
> archives tells me otherwise.

i don't know why the search didn't work.  i find exchanges in May 2006
under the heading: OutIL More on JUNK 'private parts'.  the topic
started on the OutIL mailing list.

Grant Barrett reported that there was [still is] an entry on this use
of JUNK, here:
   http://www.doubletongued.org/index.php/dictionary/junk/

Grant has Mordden quotes from 1986 and 1988, non-Mordden quotes from
1996 on.

> ... I had never heard these usages, so I wrote to Mordden and asked
> him about
> them. He said he had just "made them up."
>
> It seems to me that it is unlikely that this rather obscure short
> story
> should have had such an impact on adolescent American culture. Maybe
> the terms just
> percolated in gay culture for years--inspired by Mordden, who has
> been pretty
> popular in gay culture--and then made the crossover? Maybe Mordden was
> particularly clever in choosing terms that had not actually come
> into use but were
> so "right" that eventually folks invented them independently?

independent invention seems entirely possible.  compare similar uses
of "stuff".

arnold

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