[Ads-l] "snatch a knot in" = "hit, spank"

[Ben Zimmer]

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/suddenly-everyone-is-snatching-a-knot-and-heres-why-2017-07-26
Expressing befuddlement — and engendering it at the same time — over the
Senate’s failure to pass, as yet, any of its several legislative efforts to
overhaul the Affordable Care Act, Rep. Buddy Carter, a Georgia Republican,
offered a colorful and presumably aggressive strategy during an MSNBC
interview Wednesday: "Somebody needs to go over there to that Senate and
snatch a knot in their ass."

Video here:
https://twitter.com/kylegriffin1/status/890295376611344385

Twitter thread discussing the expression:
https://twitter.com/mattizcoop/status/890289306857811968

I don't see anything in the slang dictionaries on this. It appears to be
primarily a Southernism -- perhaps originating in Georgia and the Florida
panhandle. The earliest cite I found is from Pensacola, Fla., and the
second earliest is from Roy Blount Jr., who grew up in Decatur, Ga.

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Pensacola (Fla.) News Journal, Dec. 25, 1978, p. 64
"Santa pulls them aside and gives them the word he's going to snatch a knot
in their heads if they don't behave," he says with a twinkle in his eye.
https://www.newspapers.com/newspage/265357254/
----
Roy Blount Jr., _One Fell Soup: Or, I'm Just a Bug on the Windshield of
Life_, 1982 [1984], p. 71
"But if you could find it in your heart not to saddle them with a criminal
record, could you just let me snatch a knot in them?"
And I would snatch a knot in them.
I don't mean physically. I don't pound on my children.
https://books.google.com/books?id=56w6u-oNtRMC
----
Springfield (Mo.) Leader and Press, June 16, 1986, p. 11
I am willing to concede my suggestion that those people snatch a knot in
that child might be ill-founded.
https://www.newspapers.com/newspage/309489104/
----
Philadelphia Daily News, Sep. 28, 1987, p. 37
If you read the piece carefully, you can feel the pain and indignation of a
parent who would snatch a knot in her child before she would see him become
one the vermin who sell death and misery on street corners.
https://www.newspapers.com/newspage/186270600/
----

--bgz

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