CANDY and JUNK

[RonButters at AOL.COM]

Thanks, Arnold, for refreshing my memory. The early Mordden examples seem 
especially noteworthy: perhaps this was in New York City gay slang in the 1980s.

This reinforces my feeling that "junk" is on the rise, though I am hearing 
"boys" quite frequently in North Carolina.


In a message dated 3/15/09 1:33:01 PM, zwicky at STANFORD.EDU writes:


> 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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> 
> 




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