Language change as extortion
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Today's SMBC:
Mouseover title: "Also comics where you say 'arr' for no reason."
The aftercomic:
June 20, 2019 @ 11:54 am · Filed by Mark Liberman under Linguistics in the comics
« previous post | next post »
Today's SMBC:
Mouseover title: "Also comics where you say 'arr' for no reason."
The aftercomic:
June 20, 2019 @ 11:54 am · Filed by Mark Liberman under Linguistics in the comics
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Rube said,
June 20, 2019 @ 3:15 pm
This is pretty funny, but I still find myself going: "Why would the pirate care about those threats? Why doesn't the time traveler just go back to when the pirate was hiding the treasure in the first place?"
I guess what I'm saying is that I hate time travel stories more than I love either linguistics or comic strips.
David Morris said,
June 20, 2019 @ 3:59 pm
I had vaguely assumed that booty200s was derived from booty1700s – eg a valuable treasure which men search for and want to get their hands on.
John Shutt said,
June 20, 2019 @ 5:45 pm
Well, the current sense of "booty" harks back at least to (consulting Wikipedia) Frank Zappa's 1979 "Sheik Yerbouti" and, before that, KC and the Sunshine Band's 1976 "Shake Your Booty". Though I honestly don't find Wiktionary's suggested etymology at all compelling.
Michael Watts said,
June 21, 2019 @ 5:04 am
Etymonline says "Meaning "female body considered as a sex object" is 1920s, African-American vernacular"…
But I'm pretty confident that "female body considered as a sex object" is not the current meaning, making the note kind of strange.
My personal vague assumption would have been that "booty" in the sense discussed here just derives directly from the word "butt".
David Morris said,
June 21, 2019 @ 5:53 am
Three different sources relate it to botty, body and butt. Like many slang words, we will probably never know.
Dictionary.com calls is 'obsolete Black English'. They, or the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, obviously haven't encountered popular culture in the last 25-ish years. (I have encountered very little popular in the last 25-ish, but even I know that 'booty' isn't obsolete.)
eub said,
June 22, 2019 @ 1:01 am
"Booty call" uses the other (apparently older) sense.
Andreas Johansson said,
June 22, 2019 @ 6:43 am
Wiktionary has the "sex object" sense with a 2000 quotation. I was not familiar with it, but it's very possible I've heard it and simply assumed it was pars pro toto like in "get your lazy ass over here!"
I too had vaguely assumed that the "buttocks" sense was from the "plunder" one, on some notion of desirability.
David Marjanović said,
June 22, 2019 @ 8:26 am
Rather, the meaning of booty has shifted under the influence of butt – and under the influence of what Andreas Johansson said.
Michael Watts said,
June 22, 2019 @ 2:02 pm
Specifically, the quotation wiktionary wants to use to support that sense is "It's my duty to please that booty".
Like "booty call", this is not at all convincing, because if "booty" were used only in the sense "butt", both quotations would be unsurprising anyway.
Sean Richardson said,
June 22, 2019 @ 8:58 pm
With vague recollection of AAVE usage in songs by Parliament/Funkadelic from the early 1970s that KC and Frank Zappa must have been familiar with, I did a quick search and the first result was:
https://genius.com/Funkadelic-loose-booty-lyrics?referent_id=7782686
— apparently a song about junkies' loss of bowel control —
which while neither about dancing nor sex supports the overall sense I developed listening to the radio back then as a kid/tween/teen that booty referred to whatever anyone wanted it to that had to do with the nether regions / underwear zone.