1947 citing in Archie Comic of "butthole." What did it mean?

[Laurence Horn]

On May 9, 2012, at 10:32 AM, Amy West wrote:

> On 5/9/12 12:01 AM, Automatic digest processor wrote:
>> Date:    Tue, 8 May 2012 20:41:39 -0300
>> From:    "David A. Daniel"<dad at POKERWIZ.COM>
>> Subject: Re: 1947 citing in Archie Comic of "butthole." What did it mean?
>>
>> So, there I was last night watching Big Bang Theory, the episode with
>> Stephen Hawking in it. At the end he is telling Sheldon that his (Sheldon's)
>> findings on the Higgs Boson particle are wrong. He says there is an
>> arithmetic mistake on page 2, "quite the boner," he says. This, of course,
>> would have sent Jake - over at Two and a Half Men - into hysterics: "Hawking
>> said boner!"
> <snip>
>> So you see where I am
>> winding tortuously my way to: As Baker, John says below, Montana almost
>> certainly used butthole innocuously, secondary meanings being secondary, in
>> the manner of Hawking's boner (heheh).
>> DAD
>> PS: If "Hawking's Boner" comes to mean public use of a word that has both an
>> innocent and a rude meaning, I claim it. I suppose it could also be called
>> an "Archie's Butthole." Anyone want to claim that one?
> In fact, when I was talking to my "wicked smaht" friend he used "boner"
> as an example of a term used in comics (he mentioned Batman
> specifically) with dual meanings: innocuous and not.
>
> I checked my OED1 and while there is no entry for "butt" to mean the
> buttocks -- which surprised me --  there are plenty of entries meaning
> bottom of something or rump, and so while there may be no explicit entry
> showing "butt" as a slang term for a human bottom at that point in time,
> certainly it's within the semantic field, and certainly young boys will
> turn an innocuous term into a "dirty" one just for giggles. ("Is I. P.
> Freely there?")
>
> Has anyone checked W2?

1 the thicker end (of anything)…; specif.
a. a buttock

LH

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