salacious = 'strongly appealing'

[Jonathan Lighter]

Oyster cookies with ginger?

Ick.

PS: _Salacious_ = 'shockingly or entertainingly scandalous' is now a
mainstay of cable news.

JL

On Fri, Dec 7, 2012 at 2:54 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu>wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: salacious = 'strongly appealing'
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On Dec 7, 2012, at 2:14 PM, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
>
> > Or something.
> >
> > Of ginger cookies in Trader Joe's slickly written holiday season ad
> flyer:
> >
> > "That triple dose of this sharp, spicy, salacious root gives the cookies
> a
> > powerful bite."
> >
> > Some years I brought up the currently popular use of "salacious" to mean
> > something like "entertainingly scandalous." At that time I took it for
> > granted that OED included the earlier pop sense "obscene" (def. 2 doesn't
> > do it: it's about aphrodisiacs).
> >
> > But it doesn't.
> >
> > JL
>
> Can we be sure that's not Trader Joe's selling point on their cookies?
>  (Are they oyster cookies?)
>
> One might think that that "rare" sense 2, 'tending to provoke lust', would
> be expected to extend to, say, salacious literature (cf. AHD5, sense 1:
> 'Appealing to or stimulating sexual desire: _salacious reading material_),
> but there's no relevant cite at the OED entry, not even as a salax
> legomenon.
>
> LH
>
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