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[Arnold Zwicky]

On Jul 22, 2010, at 5:18 AM, Jon Lighter wrote:
>
> "Ratfucking" goes back to at least the early '60s, as HDAS may someday show.
> It entered politics in the era of CREEP.

Jesse Sheidlower's _The F Word_ has an excellent series of entries on the "rat-fuck" lexical sphere, including entries on the noun (in several senses), "rat-fuck" the transitive verb (in several senses, including 'to outwit; trick' from AmSp in 1964 on, with specifically political uses at the end of the subentry), and "rat-fucking" the noun 'destructive activity, pranks' (with relevant cites from 1944 and then from 1972 on -- due to Donald Segretti, probably -- as specialized to political dirty tricks).

arnold

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