> 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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