[Ads-l] Further Antedating of "Preppy"

[Jonathan Lighter]

True, true.

But with billions and zillions of printed words available, many of them
written by former preppies, how is it that the word has been statistically
almost nonexistent for most of its lifetime?

Beats me.

JL

On Fri, Oct 25, 2019 at 11:35 PM Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com> wrote:

> > "Preppy" doesn't even have the excuse of having being thought coarse or
> > unprintable.
>
> True, but it's also not a word that would have fallen trippingly from the
> tongues of the lower orders. I thought that _Choate_ was pronounced
> "Cho-ate," until I became a buddy of a Yalie who was a Choate grad while I
> was serving in the Army Security Agency. Even when the preppy style of
> dress became popular among the plebs, it was known as "Ivy League" and not
> as "preppy."
>
> On Fri, Oct 25, 2019 at 5:03 PM Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> > Maybe I've said this before, but what is most interesting in such cases
> is
> > not the remarkable age of the term, but the fact that decades (in this
> > case, many decades) evidently had to elapse before it entered common
> > currency.
> >
> > "Preppy" doesn't even have the excuse of having being thought coarse or
> > unprintable.
> >
> > JL
> >
> > On Fri, Oct 25, 2019 at 2:31 PM Shapiro, Fred <fred.shapiro at yale.edu>
> > wrote:
> >
> > > I have previously antedated the noun "preppy" (formerly having a 1956
> > > first use citation in the OED) back to 1928.  Here is a much earlier
> > cite:
> > >
> > >
> > > preppy, n. (OED 1928)
> > >
> > > 1880 _Occident_ (Colorado College newspaper) 1 Apr. 17/1 (Elephind)
> Now
> > > the thirsty preppie goes to the hydrant, faint and far; he drinks
> > directly
> > > from its notes, or takes a Leyden-jar.
> > >
> > > Fred Shapiro
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > ------------------------------------------------------------
> > > 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
>


-- 
"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