Saturday, December 08, 2012

Preface To Lips: Read Mine

I have been reading, lately, (at the advice of the the Word Detective) Hugh Rawson's Dictionary Of Euphemisms & Other Doubletalk
, & I was hoping there'd be some interesting euphemisms for "lip" or "lips" that I could share on this week's show.  Alas, there's not an entry for "lips."  But there is, in the entry for the word "bushwa," this entry:
Bushwa, also bushwah, booshwa, booshwa, boushwa, or boushwah: they all up to the same thing: bullshit.

Okay, that's unhelpful.  Let's move on to this:

Similar to "bushwa" is "bushlips," a nonce term but redolent with history, alluding to President George Bush's emphatic "Read my lips" promise (later broken) not to raise taxes.  This was typically encountered, ca. 1990, in such phrases as "Don't give me any of that bushlips" or "I know pure, unadulterated bushlips when I hear it."

Oh, to have existed in a simpler time - twenty years ago!

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