Seeley Booth says of "Bones":
Wilson Gray
hwgray at GMAIL.COM
Wed Apr 18 03:45:26 UTC 2012
On Tue, Apr 17, 2012 at 8:21 AM, Jonathan Lighter
<wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com> wrote:
> '65.
That's surprising - amazing, even - that this shift came about so
early and actually appeared in print, given that I personally didn't
hear the phrase used in the wild before 1963, when it clearly had only
the meaning, "brush someone off." Fairly soon afterwards - a year? - I
also heard it used to mean something like, "don't let him/her/it mess
with your mind."
IMO, that'a an extremely trivial semantic shift.
But SB's use - "shining her on" = "bullconning her"- is so far removed
from the IME-original meaning that. I could be easily persuaded that
any resemblance may very well be purely coincidental.
Youneverknow.
BTW, for the hell of of it, I decided to take a look a what _fuck over
someone_ is now considered to mean. I was, to say the least, startled
by the pejoration that the phrase has undergone. The war story that
I've long considered to be a paradigm example of the way in which one
person can fuck over another probably doesn't even make sense, in
light of a definition like the one for _fuck over_ given in Jesse's
essay on the F-word.
It's not that I disagree with that definition. I don't. Rather, it's
incomplete. Like, _fuck over_ ranges from one through ten, but only
the nine-through-ten range get. any respect. And _fuck over_ is
sometimes conflated with _fuck with_.
Oh, well. "It's only rock-snd-roll," to coin a phrase.
--
-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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