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

[Ben Zimmer]

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


As Jesse noted in a May 2006 ADS-L thread, _za_ was antedated by Tom
Dalzell in his _New Partridge's Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional
English_, which cites: John D. Bell et al., _Loosely Speaking_, p. 22, 1966.

https://books.google.com/books?id=mAdUqLrKw4YC&pg=PA2149

_Loosely Speaking_, a collection of slang from Carleton College in
Minnesota, is now available as a scan from the Carleton library, but it's
dated there as 1967:

https://archive.carleton.edu/Detail/collections/72536
Loosely Speaking: The Centennial Lexicon of Carleton Neologisms (New!
Expanded, Updated Edition!) / Editors: John D. Bell, Mark Dubach, H. G.
Fuller, Paul Menzel, 1967.

Carleton did celebrate its centennial in 1966, so perhaps Dalzell's date is
accurate. The "expanded, updated edition" has an addendum (starting on p.
26) that appears to be from '68 or '69. In any case, the entry for _za_ is
on p. 22:

_'za_-- short for pizza. Call 5-4485 for Bill's, 5-7660 for Gertie's.

There's no entry for _'shrooms_, but interestingly there is one for
_'rooms_ ("abbreviation for mushrooms") in an appendix on p. 25. Dalzell
dates this as 1969, but the appendix title says the slang terms are
reprinted from "an article written by James Allaway ('64) for the March 6,
1963, _'Tonian_."

_The Carletonian_ is also archived (at http://edu.arcasearch.com/usmncar/),
and the original article does indeed appear in the Mar. 6, 1963 issue on p.
5 (Jim Allaway, "I'm Trying to Say..."). Here's a direct link to the PDF of
the page:

https://edu.arcasearch.com/usmncarcn/PDFs/newPDFs/car-1963-03-06-0-005.pdf

(Along with _'rooms_ for "mushrooms," the article also has _'fee_ for
"coffee" and _'ner_ for "dinner.")

--bgz

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