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How Many Times Has the Word ‘Callipygian’ Appeared in the DMN?

Sunday's paper brought us another story about the deadly booty injections. This one was co-authored by Seema Yasmin. She bragged on Twitter about using the word "callipygian" in the story. As she should have. It is a fine word. It means "having shapely buttocks." Here's how Yasmin dropped it:
“Patients will ask for Kim Kardashian’s buttocks,” said Dr. Jennifer Walden, an aesthetic plastic surgeon and spokeswoman for the society. In her Austin clinic, Walden used to enhance the buttocks of one or two women a year as recently as 2012. Now she operates on two women a week. “Procedures go in and out of fashion. ... We’re a celebrity-obsessed culture,” she said, citing actress Sofia Vergara and hip hop artist Nicki Minaj as callipygian influences.
This got me thinking. How many times has the word "callipygian" ever been printed in the DMN? Go ahead. Guess.
By Tim Rogers |

Sunday’s paper brought us another story about the deadly booty injections. This one was co-authored by Seema Yasmin. She bragged on Twitter about using the word “callipygian” in the story. As she should have. It is a fine word. It means “having shapely buttocks.” Here’s how Yasmin dropped it:

“Patients will ask for Kim Kardashian’s buttocks,” said Dr. Jennifer Walden, an aesthetic plastic surgeon and spokeswoman for the society.

In her Austin clinic, Walden used to enhance the buttocks of one or two women a year as recently as 2012. Now she operates on two women a week.

“Procedures go in and out of fashion. … We’re a celebrity-obsessed culture,” she said, citing actress Sofia Vergara and hip hop artist Nicki Minaj as callipygian influences.

This got me thinking. How many times has the word “callipygian” ever been printed in the DMN? Go ahead. Guess. What if I told you that, from what I can gather, in the 130 years that the DMN has been in business, it has printed the word just five times, including Yasmin’s story? Fascinating, right? (Zac just answered “no.”)

In the modern era, besides Yasmin, only Olin Chism has used “callipygian” in the DMN. His doesn’t really count, though, because he was writing about a book called The Superior Person’s Second Book of Weird and Wondrous Words, by Peter Bowler. In other words, it wasn’t an organic “callipygian.” But here it was, from 1993:

Similarly, one can safely say provocative things in English as long as the words are obscure enough.

One might remark to an acquaintance, for instance: “How lovely your wife is tonight, George — so bathycolpian and callipygian.”

You have to go back to ye olden tymes to find other “callipygian”s. In 1941, Victor Davis used the word in what appears to be a column on dining and dancing. Headline: “Keep an Eye on the Hands If You Can.” Subhead: “Anent Finer Points of Hula; New Album of Hot Music Note.” It read:

When Harry Owens brought his Hawaiian Orchestra to the Mural Room some seasons back, the columnist, during the course of the band’s stay, was given a thorough lecture on the art and beauty of the hula dance.

The lecturer was the mother of one of Harry’s dancers, the chaperon for the troupe during its stay in the United States. The fond mamma was afraid the columnist, and others, too, might get the wrong idea.

“Too much accent has been put on the grass skirt and the callipygian (we reached for another on that one) undulations of the dance,” she explained. “Actually,” she went on, “these are the least important part of it. The dance really is a story in pantomime, in which the hands of the dancer, gracefully manipulated, tell the story. The rest of the body merely keeps time to the music and follows the motions of the hands.”

I’m as confused as you are. Why did “the columnist” reach for another? Another what? Anyway, that ran in February. Just a few months earlier, in September 1940, the word had popped up. Alma Cunningham used it in a story titled “Accessories Are Fashion Show Theme.” She wrote:

Those saucy fillips of fashion — accessories — provided a theme for a showing of autumn clothes Tuesday noon by A. Harris & Company, at the Century Room. … A collection of dinner and evening dresses stressed the importance of drama and glamour after 6 p.m., and the importance of Callipygian drapery, Callipygian being the Greek word for a well-proportioned derriere.

Points off for defining the word and thereby insulting your readers. You notice that Yasmin didn’t commit that mistake. Odd, then, that Cunningham would also misuse the word. The drapery isn’t callipygian. Presumably whatever the drapery covers is the thing that’s callipygian.

Which brings us to the first use of the word that I could find in the DMN. I’d argue that this one doesn’t really count, either. It was a wire story. It was datelined Westport, Connecticut. The entirety of the August 1938 story, headlined “Sally Rand’s Callipygian Curve Is Stung”:

An ignorant country wasp committed suicide Thursday by stinging the most celebrated callipygian curve in America.

Sally Rand, starring in “Rain” at the Westport Country Playhouse, was on her way to a matinee when the wasp flew in the car window and popped her. She popped back and screamed so lustily that the driver almost ran the car into a ditch.

First aid was administered (to Sally — the wasp was beyond help) at the nearby cottage of Helen Boylston, war nurse and author. Miss Boylston had no balm for wasp bites but took Sally to the back yard and applied a mud pie to the seat of the affliction.

Fortunately, Sally has to sit down only twice during the three acts of “Rain.”

Why were those three ancient “callipygian”s clustered in such a short period of just four years? Did Sally Rand, a famous burlesque dancer, really get a mud pie applied to her bottom by a famous author whose house she came to by chance? Will Seema Yasmin take this post as it was intended, as a challenge to be the only writer in the history of the Morning News to use the word “callipygian” more than once?

These are the things I think about. Thank you for allowing me to share.

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