_Kiss my grits!_

[Jonathan Lighter]

According to Higginbotham, "nitty gritty" originally meant "the area up the
anal orifice where you hit something." (That's what it says.) "That is the
real nitty gritty. _Nitty gritty_ has that meaning from Georgia westward
across the Southern United States to Arkansas, Louisiana and east Texas."
Higginbotham first heard it in Arkansas and Louisiana in the 1920s: "Memory
indicates the actual use was almost entirely black although whites knew the
phrase too.

He observes that _nitty gritty_ could be related to _shitty_, but it is is
more likely derived from _nit_ or _grit_ or both together. It used to be a
"major scatological word."

JL


On Tue, May 31, 2011 at 6:32 PM, Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com> wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Re: _Kiss my grits!_
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On Tue, May 31, 2011 at 4:12 PM, Jonathan Lighter
> <wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com> wrote:
> > "anal" connotations of "nitty gritty."
>
> What are you people talking about?!
>
> --
> -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
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>



--
"If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."

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