[Ads-l] _Hawaiian disease_

[Wilson Gray]

> Have you checked "lakanuki" in HDAS?

Surely, you jest! The spelling of "lack of nookie" for the purpose of the
joke is entirely unpredictable, not to mention that I was looking only for
"Hawaiian disease," in any case. That "lack  of nookie" under any spelling
exists outside of the context of the joke comes as a complete surprise to
me, being as much of a surprise as that "Hawaiian disease" itself exists
outside of the context of the joke or that only in St. Louis and/or in my
memory is the "hum-job" also just a joke-term characterized as "Hawaiian" and
not a genuine gender-act.

On Mon, Mar 12, 2018 at 6:08 PM, Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com>
wrote:

> 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
> >
>
>
>
> --
> "If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>



-- 
-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