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

[Ben Zimmer]

On Wed, May 9, 2012 at 10:32 AM, Amy West wrote:
>
> 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?")

OED1 does have the relevant sense, covering both animal and human buttocks:

http://books.google.com/books?id=r2pXAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA1215

...as does OED2, under _butt_ n.3, sense 3 (in an as-yet-unrevised entry):

---
3. A buttock. Chiefly dial. and colloq. in U.S.
c1450   in T. Wright & R. P. Wülcker Anglo-Saxon & Old Eng. Vocab. (1884) I. 737
  Hic lumbus, a bott.
c1450   Bk. Cookery in Holkham Coll. (1882) 58   Tak Buttes of pork and smyt
them to peces.
1486   Bk. St. Albans A v,   The marow of hogges that is in the bone of the
butte of porke.
1601   P. Holland tr. Pliny Hist. World I. 344   A Lion likewise hath but very
little [marrow], to wit, in some few bones of his thighes & buts behind.
1859   J. R. Bartlett Dict. Americanisms (ed. 2) ,   Butt‥the buttocks.
The word is used in the West in such phrases as, ‘I fell on my butt’, ‘He
kick'd my butt’.
1884   Harper's Mag. July 299/1   Rump butts, strips, rounds, and canning beef.
---

(The etymological note speculates that it goes back even further than the 15th
century, if _buttock_, attested from the 13th c., is taken to be a diminutive
of it.)

Obviously the entry is in need of heavy revision, as noted by JL elsethread. But
the "human bottom" sense at least makes an appearance in the 1859 Bartlett cite
(also discussed elsethread).

--bgz

--
Ben Zimmer
http://benzimmer.com/

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