Funked
v.tr.
- To shrink from in fright or dread.
- To be afraid of.
To shrink in fright.
Betty Debbie and I found another publishing discrepancy in our versions of Tulips For Augusta. When Augusta makes it to the top of the quarry mine (a later Omnibus copy) reads:
...she turned a white face to his and said with hurried and wholly unnecessary politeness, "Excuse me..." and fled, only to find him beside her when it was over, wiping her face very efficiently with a large white handkerchief..."Thank you...I'm sorry I flubbed." "Nonsense. If you had flubbed it, you wouldn't have gone down in the first place."
Love that wholly unnecessary politeness. Having suffered the inconvenient pangs of morning sickness in front of strangers, I sympathize. Anyway, in Betty Debbie's copy every time the word 'flubbed' appears it is replaced with 'funked'.
Which makes me think that publishers whitewashed Betty's prose (they whitewashed her!) because funked sounded too much like...........well, to quote Ralphie in A Christmas Story:
Oh Fuuuuuuuudddddggggggeeeee. Only I didn't say fudge. I said The Word. The Big One. The Queen Mother of Dirty Words. The F-Dash-Dash-Dash Word.
In which case it would be appropriate to be funked at the prospect of facing your mother and her bar of soap...
That's why it was so funny on Laugh In for Dick Martin to refer to it as the Funk & Wagnalls dictionary!
ReplyDeleteI've got the same edition as Betty Debbie, and I noticed funked out. Those wacky Brits. (A friend of mine had a license plate, "U WANKER" which she had no trouble getting by New York's DMV. In the UK, however, it's very rude. Hair-growing-the-palms rude.)