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[Mark Mandel]

I have consistenly used "rat fuck!" as an expletive of extreme irritation
since, I believe, the middle 1960s.

m a m

On Thu, Jul 22, 2010 at 9:15 AM, Arnold Zwicky <zwicky at stanford.edu> wrote:

> 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
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>

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