[Ads-l] Further Antedating of "Preppy"

Sat Oct 26 17:40:18 UTC 2019

The OED, even with all of its detailed citations -- citations that now can be more extensive than ever due to the power of full-text searching of historical texts -- may not be able to adequately convey the histories of words that have uneven trajectories.  By "uneven trajectories" I mean, for example, words that are born, die out, and then are revived.  Or words that have more than one independent coinage.

Take, for example, the noun "preppy."  I believe that the OED, instead of lumping together the "student at a preparatory school" and the "graduate of a preparatory school" senses, should separate these two sub-senses.  The first sub-sense was used infrequently in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as a simple denotation of a student at a preparatory school, without any strong economic or cultural connotation.  The second sub-sense was a (usually) pejorative reference to the upper-class college students or older plutocrats who had, earlier in their life, attended elite boarding schools.

The first sub-sense has been documented by me back to 1880.  The second sub-sense has been documented by me back to a 1954 mention in the Princeton student newspaper.  The two sub-senses have essentially distinct histories.  This is not an instance of a word "flying under the radar screen" for three quarters of a century and then becoming commonplace.  Rather it is an instance of a rare word-usage followed, three quarters of a century later, by a second word-usage that was coined in the mid-20th-century with a different connotation but took the same form as the earlier word-usage because both of them were derived from the word "preparatory."

Does this analysis make sense?

Fred Shapiro

________________________________
From: American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU> on behalf of Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at GMAIL.COM>
Sent: Saturday, October 26, 2019 9:20 AM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
Subject: Re: Further Antedating of "Preppy"

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
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > ------------------------------------------------------------
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> > >
> >
> >
> > --
> > "If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the
> truth."
> >
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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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--
"If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."

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