Use Itch-X...
Laurence Horn
laurence.horn at YALE.EDU
Tue Jun 3 00:39:50 UTC 2014
On Jun 2, 2014, at 5:24 PM, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
> 18th C. VD?
Good one. I've always wondered what sort of fun-house mirrors (or rulers) those ancestors of ours were using when they used the term with reference to their "virile member" [OED, s.v. "yard", 11]. Those mirrors have evidently been around for a while, given the cites back to 1379. Some colorful cites there, including:
1683 A. Snape Anat. Horse (1686) iii. v. 114 It [sc. the pineal gland] is also called the Yard or Prick of the Brain..because it resembleth a Man's Yard.
1693 A. Wood Life & Times (1894) III. 420 A monstrous child..It hath three yards and he makes use of them all at once.
All we'd need is three such monstrous children, and we'd have the whole…well, you know.
LH
>
>
> On Mon, Jun 2, 2014 at 3:32 PM, Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
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>> Sender: American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>> Poster: Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM>
>> Subject: Use Itch-X...
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>> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> against _yard rash_, whatever that is.
>>
>> Only 2350 raw hits.
>>
>> --
>> -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
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> --
> "If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."
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