only Plisters (and a few others)

[Mark Kohut]

Monte, who forgets almost nothing, reminds of Pynchon's use. Thanks
more than much.
Which led me on a quest today.

But first, the in-print standards might have been different for the
NYTimes magazine, a leading edge
mag compared to the daily paper and my post was not because of any
special knowledge of mine about its standards
but of two writers online who seemed to know its use in the book
review was ..unusual knowing its standards some. Or they thought it
was unusual anyway.

So I went to the OED. It turns out the earliest in-print use they have
is very late 1955, Dec 28, to be exact in a book called
JOINT by one J. Blake which was published in 1971. (I cannot explain a
55 use in a 71 book except that it must have
been citing another book...the OED uses written uses only but does
note as the 1956 entries indicate

that the word is a slang use in a folk tradition...with another entry
saying Philadelphia Negro street slang.....

A Marine pick-up use a bit later connotes tough guy...with negative
connotations in the beginning..then positive.

However,  most interesting maybe is that when one puts the word into
the Google N--Gram tracing of
the use in ALL THE BOOKS Google has digitized, one finds some usage
above the zero back in the 1820s, and
a very slight rise again in the 1840s......

Must be the (black?) folk use in the very oldest books.....

Today's language self-education

On Thu, Feb 26, 2015 at 3:17 PM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com> wrote:
> "Badass" made it past the NYT copy desk in TRP's "Luddite" essay... thirty
> years ago last fall :-)
>
> On Thu, Feb 26, 2015 at 2:11 PM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> would like this tidbit (maybe).
>>
>> The word 'badass', which I was surprised to
>> hear on TV recently---Rachel's Show---has
>> now made it past the NYT copy desk in a review.
>>
>> Badass news.
>> -
>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>
>
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l