"the Big [initial]"

Arnold Zwicky zwicky at STANFORD.EDU
Fri Sep 2 04:04:15 UTC 2011


On Sep 1, 2011, at 6:40 AM, Larry Horn wrote:

>
> On Sep 1, 2011, at 9:07 AM, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
>
>> My take, in addition, has been that the advertisers don't want to scare the
>> average American male with a word of many syllables; moreover, they don't
>> want to say such a word more than once.  It's off-putting.
>>
>>
>> JL
>
> Maybe, but like Charlie my take is that it's a standard euphemism.  In a recent paper on taboo I class "Low T" with "E.D." (along with its ancestor, VD) and "P.E." (not the gym kind) as PBIs, for Plain Brown Initialisms.

a paper appearing/to appear where?

arnold

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