1947 citing in Archie Comic of "butthole." What did it mean?

[Douglas G. Wilson]

On 4/24/2012 9:25 PM, Joel S. Berson wrote:
> -
> If sabotage, what word(s) were intended by the cartoonist?
--

The word "bughouse" suggests itself.

At least this would be natural as a predicate adjective.

It doesn't _quite_ fit semantically but I see two possible 'excuses':
(1) it was used very nonspecifically in Archie's teen slang, like
"crazy" has been used (often to mean roughly "remarkable" or so); (2) in
the original it was "it gets _me_ kind of ..." or "_I_ get kind of ...".

Others may know better than I whether this notion can hold any water.
(Does this adjective appear elsewhere in "Archie" or in comparable
contemporaneous material?)

The word "butthole" _could_ be an honest error of some sort. Even though
"butthole" would have been immediately taken as = "asshole" in
appropriate context (e.g., "My butthole hurts"), at least in my narrow
experience it was not often so used in the 1960's (about the earliest I
can remember); I'm not sure "butthole job" (say) would have been
universally taken as "asshole job" rather than "deadend job",
"pigeonhole job", "cubbyhole job", whatever.

-- Doug Wilson

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