Heard on The Doctors: _bug juice_

[Laurence Horn]

Hmm.  Are we dealing here with the inverse of the recency illusion?  The distancy illusion?   Of course it could have been in spoken use for a while before it entered into print, in perhaps a memoir of, say, life in prep school, but there weren't as many such memoirs popping up in print in those days as there are now.  If memory serves.

--LH, thinking that this gives a whole new slant on the mystery

On Mar 15, 2012, at 12:25 PM, Jonathan Lighter wrote:

> NewspaperArchive and Google Books have a handful of exx.of "mystery meat"
> from the late '40s (usually referring to meat that is actually
> "mysterious" for some reason, e.g., glows in the dark, literally of unknown
> provenance - human flesh, perhaps? etc.)
>
> The slang term seems not to appear clearly in print until the mid-50's and
> isn't commonly recorded till the '70s.
>
> In early use, "mystery" (unrecorded with "meat") referred specifically to
> hash.  It seems to have been fairly well known.  But the popularity of a
> more inclusive "mystery meat" is much more recent.
>
> JL
>
> On Thu, Mar 15, 2012 at 12:07 PM, Arnold Zwicky <zwicky at stanford.edu> wrote:
>
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>> Poster:       Arnold Zwicky <zwicky at STANFORD.EDU>
>> Subject:      Re: Heard on The Doctors: _bug juice_
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>>
>> On Mar 15, 2012, at 8:56 AM, Victor Steinbok wrote:
>>
>>> Mystery meat is well entrenched in school cafeteria and well before my
>>> time. In fact, I suspect that HDAS is off by 20-30 years at least, but I
>>> have not investigated.
>>>
>>>    VS-)
>>>
>>> On 3/15/2012 11:45 AM, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
>>>> "Mystery meat":  HDAS: 1968 (nearly 100 years earlier as plain
>> "mystery").
>>>>
>>>> JL
>>>>
>>>> On Thu, Mar 15, 2012 at 11:16 AM, Victor Steinbok<aardvark66 at gmail.com
>>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> I thought it was "mystery meat"--also used on one of the Top Chef shows
>>>>> when the meat was overcooked, making it unidentifiable....
>>>>>    VS-)
>>
>> it was common when i was a freshman at Princeton (1958-59), and i gathered
>> that the usage came from prep school usage from some time before.  so, like
>> VS, i imagine it could be taken taken back to at least the 1940s.
>>
>> arnold
>>
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>
>
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