[Ads-l] _splib_

[Jonathan Lighter]

Thanks, Wilson. HDAS files have nothing before the '60s.

JL

On Tue, Feb 21, 2017 at 4:12 AM, Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com> wrote:

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



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