[Ads-l] Kavanaugh yearbook

[Wilson Gray]

> "to ralph" was a (very) common alternative to "to barf"

I'm familiar with these two, plus "blow chunk" and "hurl" as white-guy
slang. Amongst the colored (of only my era?), the polite term is "throw up"
and the usual vulgar term, used to gross out the school cafeteria at
lunch-time, is, "vomit," very commonly pronounced "vomic."

On Wed, Sep 26, 2018 at 9:59 PM victor steinbok <aardvark66 at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Thanks. That was the interpretation that I had as well. I had acquired the
> verb a few years later, well post the undergrad years which, ironically
> coincided with Kavanaugh's. I had an excuse - my English was very limited
> in 1983
>
> VS-)
>
> On Wed, Sep 26, 2018, 8:45 PM Chris Waigl <chris at lascribe.net> wrote:
>
> > ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> > -----------------------
> > Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> > Poster:       Chris Waigl <chris at LASCRIBE.NET>
> > Subject:      Re: Kavanaugh yearbook
> >
> >
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> >
> > My partner Melinda, who was born in 1956 and grew up mostly in Virginia
> (a
> > little, but not much, further out of DC than the people in question),
> uses
> > the verb ralph in this sense.
> >
> > Chris
> >
> > On Wed, Sep 26, 2018 at 7:25 PM Arnold M. Zwicky <zwicky at stanford.edu>
> > > wrote:
> > >
> > > > > On Sep 26, 2018, at 4:20 PM, Arnold M. Zwicky <zwicky at STANFORD.EDU
> >
> > > > wrote:
> > > > >
> > > > >>
> > > > >
> > > > > from my undergrad years, 1958-62: "to ralph" was a (very) common
> > > > alternative to "to barf", both sound-symbolic / echoic / imitative
> for
> > > 'to
> > > > vomit' (and both attested from the 1960s...)
> > > >
> > > > addendum: my experience was not just from 1958-62, but from the Ivy
> > > League
> > > > -- usage from guys who seem to have brought the vocabulary with them
> > from
> > > > (mostly Eastern) prep schools.
> > > >
> > > > arnold
> > > >
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>


-- 
-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

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