[Ads-l] The UD isn't _always_ worthless!

[Jonathan Lighter]

I take back "1969": confusingly (under "attrib. & adj., where few will
look) OED affords "sissy whiskers," "sissy man," and "sissy boy" from the
1890s.

JL

On Thu, Sep 22, 2016 at 7:44 AM, Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com>
wrote:

> BTW, my impression is that "sissy," applied to children, always means
> "coward," but applied to men always means  'effeminate homosexual,' except
> fig., of course.
>
> OED doesn't bother to differentiate these two distinct senses. (Millions
> who use the "coward" sense have never even heard of the other one, IMO.)
>
> The earliest attestations are from the late 19th C.  Understandably they
> refer only to children.  (Grownups: OED 1969, HDAS files 1914.)
>
> JL
>
> On Thu, Sep 22, 2016 at 7:34 AM, Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> Against the judgment of the editor, HDAS was compelled to prefer the
>> spelling "booty" on the OCD principle that the most frequently encountered
>> orthography must determine the shape of the lemma.  At least there's a
>> cross-ref. at "boody"!
>>
>> HDAS exx. go back to 1926.  A much later memoir places "boody" [sic] in
>> Kansas several years before that. (Complete with grade-school students
>> giggling at the  homophonous "booty.")
>>
>> JL
>>
>> On Thu, Sep 22, 2016 at 4:27 AM, Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> _Boody_
>>> booty _Boody is the traditional spelling for the word booty_. The
>>> spelling
>>> 'booty' became the accepted spelling at 70's band KC and the Sunshine
>>> Band
>>> had a popular hit called Shake Your Booty.
>>> "Man, she's got a big boody"
>>> #booty #ass #backporch #groundround #catcher's mitt
>>> by JimmyCatfish June 22, 2006
>>>
>>> Not when it agrees with me, anyway!
>>>
>>> In fact, of course, it would be great to have a cite. But it's very
>>> difficult to find a cite for a word unknown in the standard language and
>>> that's also considered obscene in BE. I personally have found nothing
>>> older
>>> than the record-titles "Boodie Green"/"Boo-Dee Green," dating only from
>>> 1950 and 1959, resp., IIRC.
>>>
>>> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9dLY8qBGz0
>>> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GbeQ3RLchf4
>>>
>>> My interpretation of the not-obvious spellings is that they are
>>> euphemism-equivalents due to the word's perceived obscenity, as is also
>>> the
>>> case with _sissy_ re-spelled as _cissy_ in the record-titles, "Cissy
>>> Strut"/"Sophisticated Cissy," wherein its meaning is understood to be
>>> "fag(got)," though neither record has any words.
>>>
>>> --
>>> -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
>>>
>>> ------------------------------------------------------------
>>> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> "If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the
>> truth."
>>
>
>
>
> --
> "If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."
>



-- 
"If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org