"soft baked"; and "no great kicks"

[Garson O'Toole]

An edition of Farmer and Henley in 1905 connects half-baked and soft-baked.

1905 "A Dictionary of Slang and Colloquial English: Abridged from the
seven volume work entitled Slang and its Analogues" by John S. Farmer
and W. E. Henley, George Routledge & Sons Limited, London.

Half-baked (or Soft-baked). Half-
witted, cracked, soft (q.v.), doughy
(q.v.), half-rocked (q.v.): Fr., n'avoir
pas la tete bien cuite (1825)

http://books.google.com/books?id=kOU_AAAAYAAJ&q=soft-baked#v=snippet&

On Fri, Jul 23, 2010 at 11:30 AM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: "soft baked"; and "no great kicks"
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> At 9:57 AM -0400 7/23/10, George Thompson wrote:
>>Jonathon Green is no longer one of us, so I forwarded this item to
>>him.  He replies that Farmer & Henley give "soft-baked" as an
>>alternative form of "half-baked". I hadn't checked that book.
>>
> In my edition, I don't see it.  Under BAKED they give "half-baked"
> ('said of a dull-witted or imbecile person') but not "soft-baked".
> Under SOFT they have a lot of colo(u)rful or curious entries--
>
> "Hard (arse) or soft?" = 'third class or first?'
> "A bit of hard for a bit of soft" (venery) = 'copulation'
> "Soft-ball" (Royal Military Academy) = 'tennis'
>
> --but nothing on "soft-baked".
>
> LH
>
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