[Ads-l] "spaz(z)" redux

[Bill Mullins]

> It still seems likely that the noun predated the verb, but I haven't found
> examples for the noun earlier than Joe Fineman's diary entry, also from
> '56. (OED's earliest for the noun is from 1965, from Pauline Kael's _I Lost
> it at the Movies_.) "Spazz" appears in Dr. Seuss's _On Beyond Zebra_ (1955)
> as a fanciful letter of the alphabet (used to spell the name of a beast
> called "Spazzim"), but that doesn't seem relevant.
>
> --bgz

Horse race listings from 1936 - 1940 routinely list a horse named "Spazz" -- a possible example of Shapiro's Law?

A column called "Sports Spasms" in the Evansville IN Press​ from 1927 to 1930 routinely ran letters addressed to "Spaz".

The comic strip "Adventures of Patsy" ran a few episodes in 1947 that referred to "the land of Spaz-mottic".

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