Shrink

[John Doe]

sure...I mean, shrink itself is obviously a truncation
of "headshrinker"..so yeah it had to have become part
of colloquial usage aftet headshrinker must have
seemed not abbreviated enough - you know how we just
LOVE to abbreviate -and I surmise, perhaps wrongly,
that headshrinker originated as some macabre joke
comparing how the psychiatrist metaphorically
"shrinks" one's head and how the actual headshrinker
tribespeoples do it physically..

--- Tofuman <slowdrop at gmail.com> wrote:

> From World Wide Words
> 
> Shrink, the abbreviation, became popular in the USA
> in the 1970s,
> though it had first appeared in one of Thomas
> Pynchon's books, The
> Crying of Lot 49, in 1965 and there is anecdotal
> evidence that it was
> around earlier, which is only to be expected of a
> slang term that
> would have been mainly transmitted through the
> spoken word in its
> earliest days.
> 
> http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-shr1.htm
> 
> 



	
		
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