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

[Jonathan Lighter]

Interesting. Equally interesting is that I cannot now recover the strip
from either NPA or Google News. Even searches for "Being an usher after
school must be prime" turn up nothing.

Devilish.

JL

On Sat, Apr 28, 2012 at 10:32 PM, Ben Zimmer
<bgzimmer at babel.ling.upenn.edu>wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Ben Zimmer <bgzimmer at BABEL.LING.UPENN.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: 1947 citing in Archie Comic of "butthole." What did it
> mean?
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On Sat, Apr 28, 2012 at 9:08 PM, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
> >
> > NewspaperArchive has been down this evening. I intended to search for the
> > phrase "*Being an usher after school must be prime*!"  That could help
> > determine how many other papers ran the strip that day, and in what form.
>
> Well, OCR for comic strips is pretty hit-or-miss. I felt lucky that
> searching NPA for "butthole" actually turned up one appearance of the
> strip, in the Elyria (OH) Chronicle-Telegram (as reported upthread). I
> just tried searching on the day in question (Apr. 2, 1947) for some
> two-word collocations and found the strip in the Janesville (WI) Daily
> Gazette and the Zanesville (OH) Times Recorder. Intriguingly, in the
> Zanesville paper, the word "butthole" is illegible, as if it had been
> partially effaced. Perhaps it offended an editor's sensibilities.
>
> --bgz
>
> --
> Ben Zimmer
> http://benzimmer.com/
>
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