[Ads-l] Antedatings of "screwball"

[Jonathan Lighter]

Antedatings of "skewbald/ skewball," n. (1863: OED):

[1751 _Derby [Eng.] Mercury_ (May 31) 2: Mr. Elston's Bay Gelding,
Skewball.]

1790 _Bath [Eng.] Chronicle_ (Sept. 2) 4: Lord Barrymore's pied filly,
Skewball.

1800 _Newbern [N.C.] Gazette_ (March 20)  6: An elegant Skew-ball, near
fifteen and a half hands high...will cover Mares at the moderate price of
Four dollars.

1817, in _Western Star_ (Lebanon, O.) (Jan. 24, 1818) 4: A strawbery [sic]
Roan horse, ...a large bald face, somewhat resembling a
skewbald...appraised to thirty five dollars.

1828 _Cincinnati Republican_ (Nov. 11) 3: A spotted horse, bay and white,
commonly called a skewball.

1833 _Georgia Telergaph_ (Macon) (Feb. 27) 4: A bay filly, rather a
skewball, three years old....Appraised...at $15, Oct. 1, 1832.

1836 _National Banner and Nashville Whig_ (Nov. 2)   FOUR JENNIES;--one a
skewbald, white face.

1860 _Shasta [Cal.] Courier_ (Jan. 21) 4: Of other colors [of horses in
Syria], I saw none except in the solitary instance of a skewbald.

(A dollar in 1800 is said to have been worth about $23.50 in buying power
today; an 1832 dollar, about $34.50.)

JL

On Fri, Aug 12, 2022 at 7:48 PM Stanton McCandlish <smccandlish at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Another possible reinforcement would be from pool (billiards).  In British
> and Irish usage, a screw shot is what North Americans call a draw shot
> (shoot the cue ball below center and with long follow-through, to impart a
> lot of back-spin to it, so that it moves backwards after contact with the
> object ball absorbs the forward momentum).  It's not ball behavior that a
> non-player or a novice would expect to see or know how to do.
>
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