JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post
He said we were turning lunchtime into a 42nd street smut shop. —OED, [1977, Zigzag Apr. 28/3]
“Smut” is best appreciated when it’s unexpected smut. And that’s what this smut is in this post, the smut found in the 1851 volume of the Journal of the Franklin Institute, italicized in a running page header:
After the initial surprise of seeing it, you pretty much remember that “smut” has a number of definitions outside of the ones that you’d remember. (Like walking along 42nd St in Manhattan to get to the library, though as a young teen back in 1969 you really didn’t see any exposed smut, though you could sure smell it when the smut-palaces that peddled the stuff had their doors wide open for a summer breeze that sucked the stale smutty putrefaction of smutty smut air onto the sidewalk—so I think I smelled smut before I actually saw any. Thanks, Deuce!)
The real point is that “smut” has a number of meanings before we get to Forty Second Street: plant fungus (“A smutted grain”), a type of coal, soot, and so forth. There is one definition—of a “smut” being a tiny insect–from the Oxford English Dictionary where the quotation of its use is sort of a beautiful terror/horror stand-alone, and it comes from the New York Daily News (of course!) in 1899: “A trout..grubs in the weeds, chases larvæ, and revels in almost invisible smuts.”–Daily News 28 Dec. 6/4
Then there are the extended employments of “smut” that are stumpy and poetic, the “compounds of smut” as indexed by the OED (which is a memorable phrase all on its own): smut bag, smut corn, smut fungus, smut mill, smut machine, smut spore, smut book, smut-note; smut shop, smut-hunting, and etc.
So like a limited version of the Seussian turtles-all-the-way-down concept of language/cosmology, “smut” can handle at least a few feet of this endless tower of word towers.
