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

[Jonathan Lighter]

>  Is there any possibility that "butthole" could have meant "bottom of the
barrel"?

It all depends on what "means" means.  If it means, "What did it mean to
Bob Montana?" I think we have to say that we have no idea beyond
"disagreeable (in some unspecified way)," and we believe that solely from
context. Remember, Montana is the only person in human history known to
have used "butthole" predicatively, and even he only printed it (God knows
how) one time.

If we take the strip at face value, either it was a word-and-meaning that
Montana overheard and innocently chose to pass on, or else he invented it
for the sake of the strip.  The latter seems awfully unlikely, because it
implies an awareness that "butthole" has negative associations. It
certainly would be a coincidence if Montana had coined a word from whole
cloth that later became a common vulgarism.

If the photo images show what loggers seem to have referred to technically
as a "butthole," that would essentially prove a pre-1904 currency of the
anatomical term.  But maybe the photographers just thought it looked like
 butthole to them.

Or did the appearance of a perfectly innocent "butthole" in "Archie"
actually introduce the word into American speech via a million dirty-minded
teenagers?

Sounds crazy and undoubtedly *is* crazy.  However, not even Berrey & Van
den Bark's 1942/43 _American Thesaurus of Slang_, compiled in big-city Los
Angeles in Montana's home state of California, lists "butthole" in any
sense.

Besides "ass" and "butt" itself, it does contain, on p. 151,
"Ass-hole...bum-hole, bung-hole,...a-hole" and even the extraordinarily
uncommon (and possibly erroneous) "slop chute."

The absence of "butthole" is certainly strange. But it could have been an
oversight.

As for the willful suppression of vulgar associations, I'm still amazed by
the innocuousness of "male" and "female" "screws."

When I was a UFO buff in the 1960s, I learned that sometimes *no*
explanation seems to make sense. For now, this appears to be one of those
cases.

JL

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

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