Date:    Fri, 27 Feb 1998 22:30:53 EST
<br>From:    Bapopik  Bapopik[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]AOL.COM 
<br>Subject: Spelling Bee (long!)
<br>
<br>     The "spelling bee" is a great American institution, yet the research on
<br>it has been shoddy, and nearly non-existent.  This posting will correct that.
<br>     (I may lecture on the "spelling bee" at the ADS in January and publish
<br>this in book form--I don't know yet.)
<br>     Spelling contests burst upon the scene to form a national spelling mania
<br>in the spring of 1875.  It's so forgotten now, however, that when the authors
<br>of AMERICA IN SO MANY WORDS chose their word-of-the-year for 1875, they
<br>ignored "spelling bee" (which doesn't appear anywhere in the book) and went
<br>with the very trivial "P. D. Q."
<br>     In THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE, H. L. Mencken states on page 116 that spelling-
<br>bee "and a hundred and one other such compounds were in daily use before the
<br>Revolution."  In Supplement One, pages 202-203, "spinning-bee" is traced to
<br>1769, "husking-bee" to 1816, "apple-bee" to 1827, "quilting-bee" to 1832,
<br>"logging-bee" and "raising-bee" to 1836, "pigeon-picking-bee" to 1841,
<br>"paring-bee" to 1845, "cellar-digging-bee" and "sewing-bee" to 1856, and
<br>"spelling-bee" to 1875.  "All of them are probably older, especially
<br>_spelling-bee_," Mencken says.  In Supplement Two, page 304, note 4:
<br>
<br>     The spelling-bee was promoted by Noah Webster's famous blue-black
<br>speller, for many years the only book, save the Bible, in general circulation
<br>in the country.  But the name _spelling-bee_, though it had congeners running
<br>back to the Revolutionary era, is not recorded until the 1870s.  Before that,
<br>beginning in the 30s, _spelling-class_, _-match_ or _-school_ was used.
<br>Introduced by the radio, the _spelling-bee_ had a brief but furious vogue in
<br>England in the late 1930s.
<br>
<br>     The new Flexner-Soukhanov SPEAKING FREELY leaves out "spelling bee"
<br>entirely!  Flexner's LISTENING TO AMERICA has "Husking Bees, Quilting Bees,
<br>and Spelling Bees" on pages 316-317:
<br>
<br>     _Spelling bees_ were a New England invention, very popular after the
<br>Civil War.  The _National Spelling Bee_ was inaugurated by the _Louisville
<br>Courier-Journal_ in 1925 and continued under the Scripps-Howard newspapers
<br>after 1939
<br>======================================================================
<br>
<br>From: Automatic digest processor (2/27/98)
<br>To: Recipients of ADS-L digests
<br>
<br>         ADS-L Digest - 25 Feb 1998 to 26 Feb 1998             98-02-27 00:00:14
<br>This message contains more text than QuickMail can display. The entire message
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<br>
<br>There are 23 messages totalling 619 lines in this issue.
<br>
<br>Topics of the day:
<br>
<br>  1. Thong (sandals)
<br>  2. hurache?  Huarache!
<br>  3. Fruit boots (was thongs/zoris) (2)
<br>  4. RE Fruit boots (was thongs/zoris)
<br>  5. NADS on the web
<br>  6. RE "Till the last dog dies" (3)
<br>  7. last dog
<br>  8. footwear
<br>  9. thong (5)
<br> 10. Butt (was Re: thong) (2)
<br> 11. Gay nineties; United States of America; March hare
<br> 12. RE Re: RE "Till the last dog dies" (2)
<br> 13. Rearend/seat (was Re: Butt (was Re: thong)) (2)
<br>
<br>----------------------------------------------------------------------
<br>
<br>Date:    Thu, 26 Feb 1998 00:04:48 -0500
<br>From:    Alice Faber  faber[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]HASKINS.YALE.EDU 
<br>Subject: Thong (sandals)
<br>
<br>Larry Horn  laurence.horn[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]YALE.EDU  wrote:
<br>
<br>| At 3:03 AM -0600 2/25/98, Mike Salovesh wrote:
<br>|  
<br>|  Of course, we already had sandals . . . but the Japanese word "zori" has
<br>|  become so accepted that it now takes a regular English plural, as in
<br>|  "zoris".  (Japanese would have "one zori", "two zori", or "many zori".)
<br>|  Of course, zori (flat rubber or plastic soles held to the foot with a
<br>|  Y-shaped thong designed to pass through the space between the big toe
<br>|  and the next one) have latterly been acquiring another label, "thong
<br>|  sandals", perhaps capitalizing on the minimal titillation that might
<br>|  carry over from "thong bikinis".
<br>|  
<br>| Actually, 'thong' was in my vocabulary for those rubber beach shoes long
<br>| before 'zori'; this was on Long Island and in California in the late
<br>| 1960's.  Rather than "capitalizing on the minimal titillation" from thong
<br>| bikinis, I take the use of the longer "thong sandals" to be a classic
<br>| retronym (cf. acoustic guitar, analog watch, natrual turf, biological
<br>| mother, World War I), in which a previously unmodified label takes on a
<br>| modifier (or in the "thong" case, a head) to distinguish it from a new
<br>| cultural innovation that invades its referential space.  If I want to make
<br>| it clear I'm talking about something to wear on my feet, it would behoove
<br>| me to specify "thong sandals" rather than "thongs" tout court.
<br>
<br>I'm with Larry on this one. I grew us in the New York area in the 50s/60s.
<br>Beach and pool sandals were always called "thongs". I never encountered the
<br>word "zori" until I moved to Texas for graduate school in the mid 1970's; my
<br>first encounter with the term was via a classmate from northern California. It
<br>hadn't occurred to me that the term "thong" might have been usurped from the
<br>bathing suits (when was it that we first started reading about thong suits [in
<br>Brazil?]?).
<br>
<br>Alice Faber
<br>