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

[sclements at NEO.RR.COM]

I can still get NPA to yield the strip using just the word "butthole," and limiting the search to 1947.

Sam Clements

---- Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at GMAIL.COM> wrote:
> 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:
>
> > ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> > -----------------------
> > 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/
> >
> > ------------------------------------------------------------
> > 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."
>
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