[Ads-l] Kavanaugh yearbook

[Jonathan Lighter]

Except for "frab," I heard  every last one of the above-mentioned terms at
NYU in 1970-74. HDAS III & IV would have rounded out the coverage, but TS.

And except for "vomic" (an old form), my white-guy experience exactly
matches Wilson's testimony.

If anyone needs to be told, "throw-up" is also a noun.

JL

On Wed, Sep 26, 2018 at 11:38 PM Arnold M. Zwicky <zwicky at stanford.edu>
wrote:

> > On Sep 26, 2018, at 8:01 PM, Charles C Doyle <cdoyle at UGA.EDU> wrote:
> >
> > "Puke" is as old as Shakespeare's time.
>
> ouch. yes; i should have checked the OED.  it looks like GDoS thinks
> "puke" was neutral or merely colloquial (like "throw up" for many speakers
> today) but then slipped into slanghood.
>
> but the point relevant to the current discussion is that "barf" and
> "ralph" probably had some in-group cachet for many of the speakers we're
> talking about.
>
> i do recall at Princeton that at least some non-East-Coast public-school
> guys experienced "barf" in particular as new college slang, and "ralph" as
> a more colorful variant of the same sort.  i think i got "barf" as a
> prep-school guy thing -- i intersected with some of them when i was in high
> school -- but didn't use it myself, because i was out of their social
> class.  then i got to Princeton and discovered it was *the* collegiate
> slang term, with "ralph" as a playful variant.  (there was a brief fad for
> "frab" -- "barf" backwards -- as a playfully coded version of "barf".)
>
> if only i'd taken notes on some of the sociolinguistic richness around me!
> i had some of the linguistics, but virtually nothing on the sociocultural
> side (i later picked that up on the street).
>
> arnold
>
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>


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