[Ads-l] hog molly

[Laurence Horn]

> On Mar 1, 2018, at 1:04 PM, George Thompson <george.thompson at NYU.EDU> wrote:
> 
> ​A column by Art Stapleton of the North Jersey Record on the New York
> Giants football team that was printed in today's (March 1) issue of the
> Poughkeepsie Journal and no doubt in some other newspapers in the Gannett
> chain, quotes Dave Gettleman, the new general manager of the Giants as
> saying that having outstanding guards on the offensive line was very
> important; when the New Orleans Saints won the Super Bowl "they had two hog
> molly guards. . . ." ​
> 
> 
> DARE
> ​ has
> "hog molly" as a
> fish of the sucker family
> ​, ​
> from 1877, including​
> ​
> :
> 
> 1928  Outdoor Life 35/2 OK, I made a leisurely, light-hearted cast with a
> big “hogmolly”—I never knew where the Choctaws got the name. He was a
> sucker-mouthed individual with a pied or mottled skin. . . I figured he was
> just about what should run a big lineside bass crazy.
> 1933  AmSp 8.1.49 Ozarks, Hogmolly. . . A fish of the sucker family. The
> term is in common use among the Choctaws in Oklahoma.
> 1939  Hall Coll.  ceTN, The creek was full of fish—bass, white suckers,
> silversides, red-horses, hog mollies.
> 1954  Milwaukee Jrl. (WI) 14 Mar sec 4 4/7 swMO, Jim Owen, float trip
> outfitter on Ozark streams for 20 years, has sent many customers a
> dictionary of hillbilly outdoors terms, as follows: . . Hogmolly, a sucker.
> 
> ​The OED also has it in that sense from 1877.
> 
> I don't know where Gettleman is from.
> 
> He may be thinking of the term as "a sucker" (fish) and transferring it to
> "sucker" (generic person).
> The OED has ​
> Sucker 1b.  fig. A greenhorn, simpleton. orig. N. Amer.,
> dating to the early 19th C.
> but the OED doesn't have "sucker" in the sense of "thing", as in "Let me
> ​take a ​
> look at that sucker".
> 
> Green's Dictionary of Slang has "sucker" as
> sense 3 (c) [mid-19C+] a person (occas. animal) or object, irrespective of
> status.
> ​or
> sense 3 (e) [1910s+] a general term of address, either derog. or teasing.
> 
> And reinforcing the connection might be the thought that a hog is a large
> and powerful animal.
> 
> Green's Dictionary of Slang has "
> ​hog" as (sense
> 
> 3
> )
> a (large and powerful) vehicle [fig. ref. to the size and power of a SE
> *hog*]
> ​,​
> & (sense
> 4
> )
> of those possessing ‘masculine’ characteristics [the toughness of the
> animal].​
> 
> ​Wasn't there a briefly-celebrated football line that referred to itself as
> "the hogs"?  (Not "briefly" celebrated by the team's fans, of course; only
> by the rest of us.)
> 
> GAT  ​

Yes, that of the Redskins (if you’ll excuse the slur).  The Arkansas Razorbacks sometimes self-designate as Hogs (or maybe it’s Hawgs), motivated by the fact that that’s what razorbacks are a kind of.  

I assume there’s no connection between the hog molly and Hogmanay, although you’d probably want to steer clear of hog mollies on New Year’s Eve just in case.  

LH
  

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