no laughing aside

[Jonathan Lighter]

And there's this significant antedating of "aside":

1800 Joseph Barretti _A  Dictionary Spanish and English and English and
Spanish_ (new ed.) (s.v. _Burlar_) (London: For F. Wingrave, et al.):
 _Dexa'das la bu'rlas_, jesting aside.

Am too lazy to go back further.

JL

On Tue, Aug 23, 2011 at 1:31 PM, Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com> wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Re: no laughing aside
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On Tue, Aug 23, 2011 at 1:25 PM, Jonathan Lighter
> <wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Roughly-contemporaneous cites suggest that it's short for "laying" or
> "putting all kidding aside."
>
> FWIW, that strikes *me* as precisely the correct intuition.
>
> --
> -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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