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

[Jonathan Lighter]

HDAS has "butt" in the apposite sense back to 1720 and in the U.S. from
about a hundred years later. The gap may or may not be of significance.

As I suggested upthread, OED does an inadequate job on this one.  What
little evidence there is suggests currency in the U.S. was primarily in the
South and Midland.  Possibly (conjecturing wildly here) it began to
circulate more widely during the Civil War, as men from all over the
country were thrown together (though not nearly so much as in the World
Wars: regiments were still organized state by state).

JL

On Wed, May 9, 2012 at 10:41 AM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu>wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: 1947 citing in Archie Comic of "butthole." What did it
> mean?
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> 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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