bogart (verb) antedated (?) to 1965

[Wilson Gray]

On Sat, Dec 22, 2012 at 1:41 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu> wrote:
> Anyone hearing Little Feat's lyrics "Don't bogart that joint, my friend/Pass it over to me" would have
> been unlikely to recover a 'muscle through' sense.

Unless, of course, he had long since been familiar with the slang use
of "bogart" as a synonym of "gorilla," lately re-analysed as
"guerilla" by the younger set.

I'n confused. You have before you two clear, documented examples of
_bogart_ as a slang term. Is the claim that, because there is no
one-to-one-and-onto mapping from _bogart_ A to _bogart_ B, they're
unrelated, despite the clear semantic connection and that no one
expects any slang-term to have a fixed, immutable meaning, even at the
moment in which it springs, fully-formed, from the mind of its
creator? So, there's an excellent chance that one instance does not
antedate the other, given that it's possible to nitpick distinctions
between the two?

In that case, the fact that what I've known all of my life to be a
gross obscenity - "tap that ass" - is regarded as a euphemism for
"fuck" by white people is a simple consequence of a lack of knowledge
of the history of the term. Hence, the dysphemistic meaning that I
know from the past doesn't enter into the history of the term. The
dysphemism isn't an antedating if the euphemisn.

FWIW, the meaning "muscle through" was probably not the only meaning
of "bogart" in Chicago BE teen slang. It wasn't the only meaning of
"bogart" in Los Angeles BE adult slang.

Of course, I may be completely missing the point.

Youneverknow.

--
-Wilson
-----
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"---a strange complaint
to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-Mark Twain

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