CANDY and JUNK

[Jonathan Lighter]

FWIW, in the "male prostitution episode" of HBO's _Flight of the Conchords_,
"junk" (buttocks) was explicitly contrasted with "sugar lumps."

"Junk in the trunk" was popularized in the mid '90s, usu. in ref. to large
women, and usu. in favorable contexts.

JL

On Sun, Mar 15, 2009 at 1:33 PM, Arnold Zwicky <zwicky at stanford.edu> wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Arnold Zwicky <zwicky at STANFORD.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: CANDY and JUNK
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> 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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