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

[Laurence Horn]

And 'rents for "parents"? That one always struck me as implausible, but
there it was. Clearly a fad based on the intentional opacity of the
truncations of the initial stressed syllables.  The resultant obscurity
("za", "ner") and homonymy ("rents", "rooms", "fee") was presumably a
feature, not a bug, but perhaps that's one reason "'shrooms" caught on
later, displacing "'rooms".  Speaking of which, it appears from the earlier
observations upthread that (as I've also noticed) "shrooms" are now always
the hallucinogenic kind rather than mere pizza toppings--a kind of
Greshamite taboo avoidance.

LH

On Sun, Jul 23, 2023 at 3:06 AM Ben Zimmer <bgzimmer at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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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>

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