[Ads-l] _Hawaiian disease_

[Jonathan Lighter]

Have you checked "lakanuki" in HDAS?

JL

On Mon, Mar 12, 2018 at 6:01 PM, Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com> wrote:

> In Green's, the primary [= straight] definition is "the lack of female
> company." In '50's St. Louis, it was part of the set-up to the following
> pun:
>
> a. Do you know what the "Hawaiian disease" is?
> b. No. What?
> a. Lack o' nookie.
>
> At one time, the Hawaiian lovesong, Kāua I Ka Huahuaʻi, mistranslated into
> English as "Hawaiian War Chant," was sufficiently popular that everybody
> knew enough about what Hawaiian sounded like to understand the point of the
> punning answer to the question.
>
> Googling reveals an alternative answer: "Lack o' moolah." HDAS dates
> _moolah_ "money" from at least 1939. So, who knows which version is older?
>
> Oddly, the home of St. Louis's Shriners is the Moolah Temple of the Mystic
> Shrine. Whether this name has anything to do with the slang term I have no
> idea, though I've been wondering about it since '40's..
>
> Another "oddly" is that the "lack o'" version seems not to show up in print
> till 2010 or so and neither HDAS nor GDS has it, seemingly.
>
>
> --
> -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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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org