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

Wed Apr 25 16:28:28 UTC 2012

There are multiple instances of the term "butt holes" before 1960 in
Google Books. But these instances are primarily in the domain of ship
design and ship building/repair. This sense of "butt holes" was active
before the 1940s, in the 1940s, and afterwards it seems based on GB
dates.

Cite: 1899 December 22, Engineering, Edited by W. H. Maw and J.
Dredge, Volume 68, Quote Page 785, London. (Google Books full view)
http://books.google.com/books?id=SeYhAQAAMAAJ&q=%22butt+holes%22#v=snippet&

[Begin excerpt]
All the frame and butt holes are now transferred to the plate and the
moulds are removed.
[End excerpt]

Title: Ship repair and alteration
Authors: George Vincent Haliday; W E Swanson
Year; 1942 (GB date)
Publisher: Cornell Maritime Press, New York.
http://books.google.com/books?id=ujkEAAAAMAAJ&q=%22butt+holes%22#search_anchor

[Begin excerpts]
Mark in the holes for the molding, punch all butt holes and molding holes, ...

... pitch of the butt holes, and mark in the remaining holes as near
to the pitch required as possible.

After marking the first hole at each end so that they will be fair to
the butt holes, as at C and D, mark the other holes to the pitch
required.
[End excerpts]

Garson

On Wed, Apr 25, 2012 at 11:13 AM, Jonathan Lighter
<wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> 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?
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> 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
>> -----------------------
>> 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."
>>
>> ------------------------------------------------------------
>> 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

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