"spend a penny" -- the TLS is at it again.

[Jonathan Lighter]

GB has a snippet of
_The Synge Letters: Bishop Edward Synge to his daughter Alicia, Roscommon to
Dublin, 1746-1752_, ed. by Marie-Louise Legg (Dublin: Lilliput, 1996).
All that is relevant and visible is a tantalizing acknowledgment  "to Julia
Field, who talked to me about the early sue of the phrase 'spend a penny'"
(p. xxxvi).
Those sufficiently interested should fly to their institutional libraries to
seek further.
I can't find the phrase in Smollett via GB either or, more telling indeed,
ECCO.
The ball is thus in the court of Jennings and Fields.
JL





On Fri, Sep 23, 2011 at 1:17 PM, George Thompson <george.thompson at nyu.edu>wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       George Thompson <george.thompson at NYU.EDU>
> Subject:      "spend a penny" -- the TLS is at it again.
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> A review in the TLS of September 9, 2011 (p. 12) by Gillian Tindall, of "If
> the Walls Could Talk: An Intimate History of the Home", by Lucy Worsley
> states:
> [Worsley] does not seem aware that . . . female public loo doors always
> required one old penny to open, and that this, not the Great Exhibition of
> 1851, is the source of the enduring euphemism.
> This brought out the following reply, in the issue of September 16, 2100
> (p.
> 6), from Marie-Louise Jennings, 17 Stamford Brook Road, London W6:
> ***  This phrase is used by Tobias  Smollett in Humphry Clinker, and by the
> Irish bishop, Edward Synge, in a letter to his daughter Alicia on July 31,
> 1747, recommending her to take spa water so that she will be able to "spend
> her penny bravely".
> She does not indicate a specific source for the Synge quotation.  A
> searchable version of an 18th C edition of Clinker showed only one
> appearance of the word "penny", not in this phrase.
> I checked the OED last night: as I recall, its earliest cite was 1965;
> Jonathon Green's new slang dictionary has 1935.
> JL frequently refers to another world in which the P-Z volume of HDAS is to
> be consulted.  That world is a nobler and more just world than the one in
> which I live.
>
> I don't know how "the Great Exhibition of 1851" gets into the story.
> I don't frequent "female public loos", but men's rooms in NYC required a
> coin to access a throne until perhaps 25 years ago.  But I suppose "spend a
> penny" is a woman's euphemism, since men could always piss for free.
>
> If I recall, the previous format of the OED was up-front about what section
> of the alphabet had most recently been revised.  The current format lists
> an
> array of words beginning with A, and on and on.  Surely the project to
> revise systematically hasn't been abandoned?  Has it reached "penny" yet?
>
> You all will recall that at the beginning of the year, TLS allowed its
> correspondents to spend two months pointlessly kicking about the history of
> the word "cool" in slang.  This may be the start of another such spell.
>
> GAT
> --
> George A. Thompson
> Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre", Northwestern
> Univ.
> Pr., 1998, but nothing much since then.
>
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>



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