1947 citing in Archie Comic of "butthole." What did it mean?
Baker, John
JBAKER at STRADLEY.COM
Mon Apr 30 15:06:38 UTC 2012
I thought it might be helpful to see how people were actually using "butt" in 1947, so I did a search for "butt" or "butts" on April 2, 1947, in Access Newspaper Archive. After eliminating OCR errors, there were 25 examples found, as follows:
8 - personal names, usually "Butts."
8 - butt shingles. I would not have guessed this to be the most common use. These were all advertisements and often further specified the type (green butt shingles, square butt shingles, and so forth).
4 - butt hams or pork butts. Of these, 2 specified butt hams, 1 specified pork butts, and 1 just said "smoked boneless butts." Again, these were all advertisements. In the advertisement for smoked boneless butts, the butts were 59 cents per pound, while beef was 33 cents per pound.
1 - place name (Butt Creek).
1 - cigarette butts. I would have guessed this to be the most common use. However, this was one of the few uses (other than proper nouns) in which the term was used in editorial as opposed to advertising content. The text did not say "cigarette butts"; it merely mentioned standalone "butt" and "butts," in a brief discussion of the risk of fire from careless smokers.
1 - butt of the gun.
1 - hickory butt fishing rods.
1 - rhubarb butts (advertisement for rhubarb, promising "no butts").
This doesn't tell us too much, but I think we can draw some conclusions from it:
--"Butt" was used with some frequency, but never (in this sample) to mean "buttocks," so people probably were not expecting that meaning when they saw the word in print. People probably could have made the connection of "butthole" to "anus" with context (since they knew that butt could mean ass, and they knew "asshole"), but they were unlikely to make the jump without context, unless they had heard the term before.
--In the meat context, people used "butt" to refer to ham, a quality pork meat, rather than low-grade beef, so a contrast with "prime beef" is unlikely.
John Baker
-----Original Message-----
From: American Dialect Society [mailto:ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf Of Jonathan Lighter
Sent: Sunday, April 29, 2012 9:02 PM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: Re: 1947 citing in Archie Comic of "butthole." What did it mean?
John's analysis is as acute as always, but I don't think we can say with
any confidence that "butthole" was "vanishingly rare" in 1947, given the
taboo or semi-taboo nature of the term, the antiquity of "butt," and the
discovery of a printed 1942 ex. that was already part of a larger idiom
("cut someone a new butt-hole").
Of course, the above explains nothing. Anyone adult familiar with "butt"
(and there must have been millions) would have been likely to associate
even a novel-seeming "butthole" with the anus - regardless if Montana was
punning on the packing-industry term.
Which few people knew. And if Montana knew it, he'd know it referred to a
cow's asshole, and - if he had any sense - he wouldn't have put it in his
strip. I suspect that the semantic link to "prime" is simply a coincidence.
Unless, in line with Doug, it was intended by a letterer as an April Fool's
prank - a prank that succeeded too well.
JL
On Sun, Apr 29, 2012 at 8:40 PM, Baker, John <JBAKER at stradley.com> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> Sender: American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster: "Baker, John" <JBAKER at STRADLEY.COM>
> Subject: Re: 1947 citing in Archie Comic of "butthole." What did it
> mean?
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> The transcription error theory assumes a lot. It's certainly possible
> that Bob Montana, the Archie artist, had someone else do his lettering. I
> would guess (but don't know) that Montana inked the strip himself, but
> lettering is a specialized and, to most cartoonists, rather boring skill.
> For example, Carl Barks, who otherwise created the Donald Duck and Uncle
> Scrooge comic book stories from scratch, had his wife do the lettering. If
> Montana had any kind of artistic assistant at all, that person would have
> done its lettering. Most cartoonists today use computer fonts. But
> consider the following assumptions implicit in the theory:
>
> 1. It assumes that the letterer would have seen some other word and
> instead lettered "butthole," a word that at the time was vanishingly rare
> and, under this assumption, would have made no sense in context.
>
> 2. It assumes that Montana did not even look at the strip before it was
> sent off to the syndicate. That can't have been normal procedure.
>
> 3. It assumes that there was no question from the syndicate or from the
> carrying newspapers (except maybe in Zanesville). I would think that the
> syndicate may well have asked Montana about the word, possibly even by long
> distance telephone. Presumably he had some satisfactory explanation of the
> word's meaning (unfortunately unobtainable to us). As for the carrying
> newspapers, there were 700 of these, according to Wikipedia, and each had
> an editor. The 700 number is probably from when the strip's popularity was
> at its height, but I expect that was around 1947. In many small towns, of
> course, the comic strips would have been run without further review, and
> probably there had never been any trouble from Archie, which was not a
> transgressive strip, but larger newspapers would know from sad experience
> that every strip had to be reviewed.
>
> So, while I don't mean to eliminate a transcription error as a
> possibility, I think the theory raises more questions than it answers.
>
>
> John Baker
>
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: American Dialect Society [mailto:ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf
> Of Jonathan Lighter
> Sent: Sunday, April 29, 2012 7:47 PM
> To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
> Subject: Re: 1947 citing in Archie Comic of "butthole." What did it mean?
>
> "Dullville" is a good guess, but AFAIK the adjective isn't recorded till
> the beatnik era. (The 1951 exx. I see are nouns, e.g., "runs from Boreburg
> to Dullville" [Walter Winchell].)
>
> *If* it existed in 1947, it might have been the sort of word that teenagers
> would use.
>
> It's a big *if,* however. And "Dullsville" has always been far more
> common.
>
>
> JL
>
> On Sun, Apr 29, 2012 at 5:46 PM, Douglas G. Wilson <douglas at nb.net> wrote:
>
> > ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> > -----------------------
> > Sender: American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> > Poster: "Douglas G. Wilson" <douglas at NB.NET>
> > Subject: Re: 1947 citing in Archie Comic of "butthole." What did it
> > mean?
> >
> >
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> >
> > The word "dull[s]ville" suggests itself.
> >
> > I see "Dullville" in more-or-less appropriate figurative use as early as
> > 1951. It could have been in existence -- although likely infrequent and
> > not universally familiar -- as early as 1947.
> >
> > Whoever inked the strip's text could have copied this word wrong, for
> > any of several reasons (perhaps even intentionally), e.g., in tracing or
> > transcribing a partially illegible draft.
> >
> > ----------
> >
> > The defacement of "butthole" in the Zanesville paper is interesting. To
> > my eye, this is extremely unlikely to be fortuitous: I believe someone
> > disliked the word and scrubbed it out. Is it possible to guess when/how
> > this occurred? I picture some reader (in 1947, or maybe in [say] 1987)
> > simply defacing a copy, the copy which was digitized for N'archive,
> > which appears to be labeled "Ohio State Museum / Newspaper Division".
> > Might it be possible to review a different copy (in a different library
> > or whatever)?
> >
> > ----------
> >
> > Has somebody already noted the date of the item? Maybe set up for print
> > on 1 April, I suppose? Do strange things appear on the same date in
> > other years?
> >
> > (In the Elyria paper I find "Archie" from 2 April 1946, without anything
> > stranger than "chippin' your gums". The 1 April 1946 installment is
> > devoted to Archie's friends playing a trick on him [but Jughead seems to
> > take the medicine instead]. I don't find anything explicit for the
> > special day in 1947.)
> >
> > -- Doug Wilson
> >
> > ------------------------------------------------------------
> > 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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>
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> 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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