Dive (was Re: Sad hour)

[Wilson Gray]

On Sat, Jan 11, 2014 at 8:34 AM, Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com>wrote:

> Yeah, but I didn't hear it till the mid '70s, so what are ya gonna do?


Right. Youneverknow. It's like reading an undocumented version of HDAS.

You know, after the fact, it occurs to me that a Web-search might, indeed,
yield some form of documentation for these random memories, even if it's as
recent as that "break nasty" v. "break bad." It doesn't really hurt my
feelings that what I "know," i.e only in my personal experience, to be the
earlier form is documented only way later.

So, WTF?

Weatherman - Page 294
books.google.com/books?id=NHmsAAAAIAAJ
Harold Jacobs - 1971
There are enough people in Babylon to kick pig ass from the Atlantic to the
Pacific and back again. We can kick pig ass _for days_, if we all start
doing it. So why not? History will show that the pigs who publicly kick the
people in the ass inevitably ...

wherein, according to my Sprachgefuehl, "for days" means "as much as we
want to" - "as ADJ/ADV as PRON want to" also is a colored-ism - cf. Archie
Bell bragging of the Drells, "We don't only *sing*, but we *dance* _as good
as we *want* to_!" and the folk-brag, "I'm not as bad as I *can* be, I'm
_as bad as I *want* to be_!" - and not that "we'll have some random length
of time in which to accomplish the ass-kicking, before the pigs start
kicking back or whatever."

The date is about ten years after I first heard it and this is in line with
my on-the-basis-of-a-couple-of-random-coincidences-in-HDAS theory that ten
years is about what it takes for new slang to appear in print get
published, abstracting away from stuff originating in or popularized by
publication, like "catch-22" or "shine NP on."
--
-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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