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

[Joel S. Berson]

At 4/25/2012 10:01 AM, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
> >  Is there any possibility that "butthole" could have meant "bottom of the
>barrel"?

A la "bung-hole", which JL mentions casually below but astonishingly
does not call attention to?

1)  Did "bung-hole" ever mean "disagreeable"?  Or whatever Archie
meant by "Oh, it gets kinda butthole at times."

2)  Could someone possibly have transformed "bung-hole" into "butthole"?

3)  That still leaves questions, including how it got past the censors.

4)  Even "bung-hole" might not have passed the censors -- it was used
to mean "anus" in a 1611 dictionary, in the definition of a type of
fish, so presumably it was well-understood in that sense then.  (But
apparently not used later, I conclude from the absence of additional
quotations in the OED.)

Joel




>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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