SNL's Kenan Thompson...

[Wilson Gray]

in one of his skits. used the term,

"Boodysnatcher"

That's probably the first time that I've heard that since I was eight
years old (1945) and the horror film, _The Bodysnatcher_, was new.
There was an accompanying nonce-game called "boodysnatching," like
unto the game known as "grabbing-ass" in the old, black-boot Army.
(Sigh! *We* used to speak of "the old, brown-boot Army"! As the late,
great bluesman, Floyd Dixon of Marshall, Texas, sang, "Time brings
about a change," which I heard as "... brings _by_ a change," at the
time. A consequence of my having lived too long in Saint Louis, no
doubt.)

WRT the military, even in the '60's, grabbing-ass as already changing
from the name of a specific action literally involving the grabbing of
someone's buh-tox to a general term for any kind of kinetic
offgoofing, with a concomitant shift from "grabbing-ass" to
"grab-assing" to simple "grab-ass," the last - or should that be "the
latter"? - sometimes jocularly pronounced as the pswaydo-French
[,gr^-'bas].

--
-Wilson
-----
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"---a strange complaint
to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-Mark Twain

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