[Ads-l] Further Antedating of "Preppy"

Sat Oct 26 21:10:33 UTC 2019

A distinction only a Preppy would make, but seriously folks.

A collection of college slang apparently gathered an published in 1898 includes several preppy-related words not strictly limited to the original sense of a student in a prep school which you may consider a third sense, or precursor?

There's a full description of the methodology at the beginning of the book, but basically they sent out questionaires to dozens of schools, then trimmed the list down to words that were apparently unique to college environments and not merely slang used elsewhere.

For each word, they give several senses of the word, and then a list of schools from which each sense was reported.

Some of the Prep/Preppy-related words include one more literal sense, related to a prep school, and other pejorative meanings.

Prep, adjective, for example, can mean "Preparatory, as a 'prep school.'" or "Porr, mean.

Prep, noun, can mean "a preparatory student," a "lazy student," an "undignified upper-classman," or "preparation."

Prepish, reported only from Phillips Exeter Academy, is defined as "silly, immature."

Preppy, adjective, is defined as "silly, immature," with usage reported from Hamilton College (New York), Heidelberg University (Ohio), Iowa College (now Grinnell, in Iowa), Oberlin (Ohio) and Phillips Exeter Academy.

Eugene H. Babbitt, Dialect Notes, Volume 2, Part 1, College Words and Phrases, New Haven, Connecticut, The Tuttle, Morehouse & Taylor Co., page 51.

I did not see a date on the frontispiece.  The book was lumped in a collection of "pamphlets".  The online catalogue record gives a date of  1891-1900.

https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/003918852

The catalogue record indicates that the Editor of the list, Babbitt, was born in 1859, so the date seems appropriate.

------ Original Message ------
From: "Shapiro, Fred" <fred.shapiro at yale.edu>
To: ADS-L at listserv.uga.edu
Sent: 10/26/2019 10:40:18 AM
Subject: Re: Further Antedating of "Preppy"

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Poster: "Shapiro, Fred" <fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU>
Subject: Re: Further Antedating of "Preppy"
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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 hist=
orical texts -- may not be able to adequately convey the histories of words=
that have uneven trajectories. By "uneven trajectories" I mean, for examp=
le, 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 l=
umping together the "student at a preparatory school" and the "graduate of =
a preparatory school" senses, should separate these two sub-senses. The fi=
rst sub-sense was used infrequently in the late 19th and early 20th centuri=
es as a simple denotation of a student at a preparatory school, without any=
strong economic or cultural connotation. The second sub-sense was a (usua=
lly) pejorative reference to the upper-class college students or older plut=
ocrats 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 st=
udent 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 inst=
ance 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 Jonath=
an 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 no=
t
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 - https://nam05.safelinks.protection.out=
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>
>
> --
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>
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--
-Wilson
-----
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