[Ads-l] _splib_

[Wilson Gray]

On Mon, Feb 20, 2017 at 6:55 AM, Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com>
wrote:

> the early '70s


Using a word that had passed out of use at least as far back as the early
’50’s - well, in The Lou, anyway - hoping to whip game, because no one who
was hip would be reading the claim.

Apparently, it was still being used somewhere else, though. In the ’60’s,
there was an article in NewsTIME in which a black collegian explain that,
when white fellow-students asked him what _splib_ meant, he would "explain"
that it meant something like, "Society for Proclaiming Liberty to Blacks"
or some such. ROTFLMAO

Oddly, _splib_ is older, in my personal experience - back to the late ’40’s
- than _ofay_, which I knew only as a literary term till the middle ’50’s.
Even then, only a single ace-boon used it. And he probably had learned it
as a literary term, too.

At that time, _fade_ was the usual term, in The Lou, for a white person.
This could have led me to a false etymology, had I not already been
familiar with "ofay" from reading it. Well, the concomitant use of "shade"
for a black person, i.e. "shades and fades" = "blacks and whites," probably
would have been sufficient to preclude my leaping to the wrong conclusion.

-- 
-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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