[Ads-l] "K. P. pusher"

Wilson Gray hwgray at GMAIL.COM
Wed Apr 1 00:37:28 UTC 2015


I had no idea that this term was already familiar to lexicography twenty
years before the first - and only - time that I ever heard it, at the late,
unlamented Fort Devens, Massachusetts, in 1959. A local hero was the EM,
who having had it, grabbed the K.P. pusher by the throat and pointed out to
him that: "Those stripes cover only a little bit of your arm and *none* of
your ass!"

Word Study - Volumes 15-29 - Page 147 G. & C. Merriam Company, 1939
1939 - ‎Snippet view
https://books.google.com/books?id=lJEcAQAAMAAJ
Eventually, as he completes this detail and wonders what to do next, a _K.
P. pusher_ (in other words, the supervisor of his activities) or some other
similarly kind-hearted soul will tell him to _take off_ – “to go away," get
out of sight before something ...

IME, the phrase was "take off _like a big bird_." The above suggests that
that was an extension of the original.
-- 
-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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