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

[George Thompson]

I surmise that "Marie-Louise Jennings" is the married name/divorced name of
"Marie-Louise Legg".

On Fri, Sep 23, 2011 at 1:42 PM, Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com>wrote:

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



--
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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