_To hustle butt_

[J P Maher]

Boody, alternate Bootie.. The movie._The Hustler_ 1961 introduced that H-word to the general US public. In white  north-eastern speech a Hustler was any vigorous entrepreneur, and a Booster was anyone in the white community who was a vocal supporter of a cause, an idea, while in the black community a Booster was an accomplice in theft, the guy who helped you over the fence in a burglary. Tom Kochman among others introduced these black usages to whites in the mid and late 1960s.  -- Wilson localizes the right social milieu.  He also rightly collocates Hustler with Butt.  Butt was in circulation in Archieland for hams, pork,  rifles and Fag-ends, as the Brits call cigarette butts. After cigarettes come into favor, replacing the clay pipe of the stage mick, in and after  wars of the early 19th century. All of this accords with Bartlett's DAE note on Butt for arse as "western". "The West" was east of the Mississippi. Beyond lay Injun
 country.To repeat, in 1859 Butt was a hillbilly term. Politer yankees said Woodsman... E.g. Davy Crockett.. BTW he knew Crap only inb the Scottish sense of Crop. It WAS Thos. Crapper who gave us that one, notwithstanding all the Xerox antedatings. --Buttr was NOT Archie-speak in 1947.
. Similarly a B 

    _To hustle butt_
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This is more-or-less in both G and GB, but the specific and unique
meaning, "to work as a prostitute" - there was no other, in that place
and at that time - seems to exist only in my memory of the black
sporting life of '60's L.A. It was a mildly-hipper - thanks to the
assonance - variant of "to sell ass"/"to sell boody."

Anybody who worked for a living in a steady job, but not in a "square"
job was referred to as a 'hustler" and doing the job was "hustling":
dealing dope, selling stolen goods, gambling, as was free-lance
whoring - "paying with pussy" - in an emergency.

--
-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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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org