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

[Jonathan Lighter]

"Bughouse" was pretty old-fashioned in 1947 - which is not to say that
nobody used it. Archie, however, is a teenager.

That, added to the semantic oddity, in this context, of a word meaning
"insane" leads me to suspect that "bughouse" isn't part of the equation.

I'm not sure either that there's room enough  in the balloon, as drawn, to
fit in "me." "I get kind of bughouse" seems so far from what's on the page
that it's no harder to believe that Montana or a saboteur printed exactly
what he meant.

I'm unaware of any exx. of "butthole" in American English in the OED's
(rare) sense of "dead end."  Not that "dead-end" would fit Archie's
context.

The incredibly inconclusive evidence suggests that the 1904 ex. I cited
refers to a hole in a tree trunk.  But as far as I can tell, this meaning
is attested clearly only one time in the history of the printed word.

But what question are we trying to answer?

In context, "butthole" must mean something like "disagreeable."  No problem
there.

Was it ever popular slang?  Evidently never.

How did it get past the editors?  Maybe inattention.

What was Bob Montana thinking?  Can't guess.

Was the strip sabotaged?  Beats me.

Why is there no record of "butthole" 'anus' findable *anywhere* before the
early '50s?  That may be the most interesting question of all.

JL



On Tue, Apr 24, 2012 at 10:39 PM, Douglas G. Wilson <douglas at nb.net> wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       "Douglas G. Wilson" <douglas at NB.NET>
> Subject:      Re: 1947 citing in Archie Comic of "butthole." What did it
> mean?
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> 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
>



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

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