Re: file searching/vista help

[Bill Troop billtroop@xxxxxxxx]

Well, it is said that Edmund Wilson declined to review Purdy's 'The
House of the Solitary Maggot' for the NYT with the quip, 'I don't do
Southern Gothic.' However, I don't think one can call him a Southern
writer -- he's from Ohio, though born not in 1923 as so often stated,
but 1913 he now admits. But many of the books have Southern settings,
or one might say proto-Southern settings. Purdy says he remembers
'Tarbox' being used as a term of aspersion - - and I think you must
be right to draw the association with tarbrush. But I'd like to be
able to find something more than that . . . . and not that the word
needs to be defined for any reader of the book as the book itself
clearly defines it.

At 4/24/2008 08:41 PM, you wrote:
> Bill Troop wrote:
> > But on the other, he claims that 'chicken dainty' is a kind of
> > caramel confection and here he is obviously pulling one's leg.
> Not necessarily. Purdy is a Southern writer, no? And Appalachian and
> other Southern varieties of English have some highly unusual (I
> dassn't say "colorful") words that never make it into the
> dictionaries. That might well be a local term.
> > Speaking of which, I might as well ask, has anyone ever come across
> > the aspersion 'tarbox' ?
> The OED calls it "a box formerly used by shepherds to hold tar as a
> salve for sheep." If it was used as an aspersion, I suspect some
> confusion or conflation with "tarbrush," a politically incorrect way
> of saying a person shows signs of being of part African ancestry.
> In general, if you want the real skinny on the etymological or
> semantic history of an English word, the place to go is the OED.
> Nothing else is anywhere near it.
>
> --
> Patricia M. Godfrey
> priscamg@xxxxxxxx