[Ads-l] "shroom" a/d's

Sat Jul 22 19:56:02 UTC 2023

Excellent cites, Jesse.
Here is a 1967 citation in which mushrooms are referred to as “M. U.
Shrooms” within a satirical play. The motivation for the name is
unclear. It might be a reference to pre-existing psychedelic slang. I
don’t know.

Date: Nov 30, 1967
Newspaper: The Philadelphia Inquirer
Newspaper Location: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Article: Boiler Room Is the Setting for Satire
Author: Samuel L. Singer (The Inquirer Staff)
Quote Page 29, Column 4 and 5
Database: Newspapers.com

https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-philadelphia-inquirer/128679714/

[Begin excerpt]
Valentine Brose, looking like a gangly Western TV hero, is an
individualist who hopefully raises mushrooms (M. U. Shrooms), hates
work and in-laws and brings his bride to live in the boiler room.
[End excerpt]

Garson

On Sat, Jul 22, 2023 at 2:46 PM Jesse Sheidlower <jester at panix.com> wrote:
>
> While taking a break from cooking, I thought I'd take a look at this.... Hard to search, as a huge number of database hits are for "mush-room" over a linebreak, but here are a couple:
>
> shroom n. 'a mushroom' Merriam-Webster 1976, OED 1977
>
> 1968 _'Teen_ Sept. 48/3: The fourth boy was going to split a pizza with his date, so he
> ordered "a 'za with 'shrooms and 'chovies with grazing room for two."
>
> (This also antedates OED for _za_, which they have from a 1968-70 volume of _Current Slang_.)
>
> https://archive.org/details/sim_teen_1968-09_12_9/page/48/mode/1up
>
> shroom n. (specif.) = magic mushroom, OED 1979
>
> 1973 _Silver Sands_ (Broward Community College, Ft. Lauderdale, Florida) 49/2: I've already made $200 this week.... All I do is take the orders, drive my van up to the pastures in White City, load up with shrooms, and ship them to my customers via air mail.... One weekend some friends and I searched through a pasture and found some of the 'Magic Mushrooms' we had heard so much about.
>
> https://archive.org/details/silversands197273brow/page/n56/mode/1up
>
> Jesse Sheidlower
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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