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

[Jonathan Lighter]

I've just conferred with someone who was a devoted reader of Archie comics
as a teenager in a working-class neighborhood of NYC 1947.

When I described the strip to her, she actually froze.  With a look of
astonishment she asked, "What did it *mean*?"

I explained that that's part of the mystery, but not the biggest part. I
asked her how she thought she would have reacted in 1947.  She said she
"would have been mystified."  But she was as certain as she could be that
she wouldn't have thought of any vulgarity:  "People didn't talk about
their butts back then.  I guess they said, 'Move your butt' sometimes, but
that was about all. Of course, I was only thirteen. I didn't know
anything."

[The days that are no more! -ed.]

She emphasized that she would have been "mystified" and not at all
"shocked," because a reference to the human butt in Archie comics would
have been literally unthinkable.  She also doubted that she'd actually
heard the word "butthole" before the 1960s: "People didn't talk about their
anuses either."

Upon viewing the strip itself, she was even more amazed: "If I'd read that,
I would have thought, '/b@ 'Toli/'?
What does *that* mean?  Then - you know how when you're reading comic
strips and you see a word you don't know, you just keep reading? - I'd have
ignored it and just kept reading."

Perhaps not the average 1947 American.  But an interesting perspective.  If
I'd seen it in the 1950s, at say, age 10, I might have reacted precisely
the same way.  We didn't talk about our buttholes either.  Or, for that
matter, anybody else's.

JL


On Wed, Apr 25, 2012 at 10:01 AM, Jonathan Lighter
<wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com>wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Re: 1947 citing in Archie Comic of "butthole." What did it
> mean?
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> >  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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