Dust Puppy is a character in the cartoon User Friendly.
Slut's wool has a certain ring to it - probably invented by some
puritan trying to give dust a bad name.
Computers are notoriously dust-hungry. And my mice's balls used to get
tangled up with cat-hair.
Roger
On 8/30/07, Robin Hamilton <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> > Here's a question for the resident word sleuth: history of the US term
> > "dust bunny" ("beggar's velvet" in the Queen's English?)
> >
> > Mark
>
> I can't find "dust bunny" in anything on my shelves, so that suggests it's
> *very recent. [I've the 1998 edition of Jonathan Green's Cassell/Slang, and
> it's not there. If it's in his 2002 (?) revision, that would suggest it
> comes in just before the current millenium.]
>
> Wiki -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_bunny -- has a nice entry, but
> nothing specifically on where the term comes from, which again suggests it's
> current and recent.
>
> Then this:
>
> "Other obsessions are more curious; is it the North American housewife's
> hygiene fetish which has given us more than a dozen terms (dust-bunny,
> dust-kitty, ghost-turd, etc.) for the balls of fluff found on an unswept
> floor, where British English has only one (beggars velvet )? "
>
> -- Tony Thorne, Slang and the Dictionary (
> http://www.kcl.ac.uk/content/1/c4/45/10/Slang%20and%20the%20Dictionary.doc )
>
> Which brings us to "beggar's velvet".
>
> I'd guess that this is "familiar" (to the writer -- and Mark. Mark?) since
> it occurs in Beale/Patridge (and I imagine earlier editions of Partridge).
> Except that the entry there is a straight lift from Farmer and Henley's
> _Slang_ (1899):
>
> "BEGGAR'S VELVET, subs. (common). -- Downy particles which accumulate under
> furniture from the negligence of housemaids. Otherwise called SLUT'S-WOOL
> (q.v.)"
>
> Farmer -- unusually, as he's pretty meticulous in this area-- doesn't give
> any citations, so presumably it's not recorded in any earlier dictionaries
> (certainly not in any of the five editions of Francis Grose, which I
> checked). Which means (probably) that it's (either) common as dirt [so to
> speak], so Farmer doesn't feel the need for a citation, [or] it's so rare
> trhat Farmer couldn't find an example. Perhaps, even, he or Henley made it
> up.
>
> Farmer's q.v. dead-ends in SLUT, but the OED does add a little here, under
> <SLUT n: 5. Special collocations>
>
> 1862 Edin. Rev. Apr. 410 Upstairs there is 'slut's wool' under the beds.
> 1893 Westm. Rev. Jan. 17 She would also... see that floors were scrubbed,
> and corners clear of 'slut's-wool', and spiders well kept down.
>
> (Note that both quotations have scare-quotes around "slut's wool", probably
> because the phrase is seen by the writers as colloquial. There's nothing in
> the OED [2.3] on "beggar's velvet".)
>
> That's about all I can find out.
>
> {If anyone has access to it, the online version of the OED -- Ed4 -- is
> updating all the time, so there may be an entry on "dust bunny" there. They
> do have D'oh!}
>
> In summary: "dust bunny" would seem to be really recent, one of a set of
> words-for-the-thing (and maybe paralleled by "hair-ball" for the stuff that
> gets stuck in a cat's throat?) and currently the most popular / commonest
> term for it.
>
> [Come to think of it, maybe it's a coinage from a TV series or a movie?]
>
> "Beggar's velvet", whether or not he made it up, goes back to Farmer's
> dictionary, and isn't found independently of that. (Unless someone can come
> up with an independent usage.)
>
> [I've two sections [out of 15] {or will have} on Farmer in A BLAST FOR
> BLOWENS -- one on his dictionary, and the other on _Musa Pedestris_. Both
> Farmer texts are available online: Musa in Gutenberg, and Slang if you go
> to Internet Archives and Search <Farmer slang>.]
>
> EndRodent'sTail
>
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