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

[Ben Zimmer]

On Sun, Apr 29, 2012 at 8:05 AM, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
> On Sat, Apr 28, 2012 at 10:32 PM, Ben Zimmer wrote
> > 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.
>
> 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.

The Google News Archive given at the top of the thread is still good:

http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=plAsAAAAIBAJ&pg=4081%2C91102

And as I said, bad OCR is going to keep you from finding the strip in
NPA with a long search string -- certainly not with eight words. I
found the Janesville and Zanesville exx using two-word combos.

--bgz

--
Ben Zimmer
http://benzimmer.com/

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