>shag carpet bomb wrote:
> >
> > At 10:11 PM 2/25/2009, Philip Pilkington wrote:
> > >People don't focus on
> > >"appearances" or "sounds" of things to create new meaningful words,
> they try
> > >to expand on the past meanings.
>
>Yes. On the past meanings THAT THEY ARE AWARE OF. So the relevant
>context for "pansy" as gay is the usage of the word in the early 20th
>century. The earliest appearance of 'new' words in print probably lags
>by 30 or so years the oral usage. If "pansy" is recoreded in the 1920s,
>that strongly suggests its origins in the (new) homosexual 'lifestyle'
>of the late 19th century: Wilde, some of Whitman's followers, etc. And
>reference sound assoications: how old is the expression "pantywaist"
>
>And I wonder if shag herself could be certain whether or not "Dick
>Nixon" was lurking in the background of her coinage of limpdick.
heh. hadn't thought of that -- not consciously. I never think of him as Dick. I wasn't politically aware enough to have heard much reference to him at the time. He's always Richard Nixon to me, and it's a little jolting to be reminded that people think of him as tricky dick.
consciously, i coined the phrase when I was sitting in a new apartment in FL, having just set up my computer. I had come to hate the place since nothing good had happened since I'd moved there just 6 months before. I started surfing, looking for job boards and came across a Web site with an aerial image of Florida -- one taken from a satellite. Sort of like this, http://www.cfhf.net/images/fla-sat1.jpg Someone had turn it into the header image for a web site circa 1999 or 2000.
I sat there and thought, "Oh. My. Dog. I'm living on a giant, limp dick hanging off the united states of 'merika. And even worse, I'm living on some syphilis sore hanging off the backside of the big limp dick. Because, look at it, it's like a gigantic syphilitic dick dripping the Keys off it.
shag
(i'm sure B. Ehrenreich would be pleased to learn that she was living on syphilis drippings at one point. :)
