My sister has a bit of a question.

[conuly]

She's trying to track the origin of the term "BBW", or "Big Beautiful Woman". The earliest citation Wikipedia gives is the eponymous magazine in 1979, but frankly the evidence there is a little scanty. Jenn is certain it must have originated earlier, probably in porn.

I think the odds of getting conclusive evidence without a full-on trawl of IRL documents is slim to none, but does anybody have a verifiable citation prior to 1979? Personal anecdotes that are dated to sometime before the 1970s are helpful too, but only if you are certain that you're not muddying the timeline, as people are wont to do.

Alternatively, if you can recommend a reliable amateur lexicocographer to do the legwork, one who is active as of now, that'd be useful too.

Comments

[peoriapeoriawhereart]

Here's my thoughts on the search. It may have developed in porn; porn had a need to make it easy to find what was sought, without a lot of dancing around. It also could have come out of the other sorts of Love Yourself, No One Else movements of the time, as a play on their language.

You may want to see if you can find someone that knows the late 60s and the 70s as a cultural historian. They may be able to narrow down where to look for earlier examples. Since that period has audio that's preserved and also various things like tv and film, you need to start in a reasonable haystack.

After it is found in the wild earlier, look back a bit more.

[delphi]

Just in terms of where interested parties might want to look to find out, pre-1979 is a bit early for most of the standardized porn categories we know today. I'm not ruling it out, but that was really a phenomenon of the '80s and beyond. If anything, I'd suspect that if the abbreviation or something similar originated earlier, it would be in the realm of newspaper and magazine personal ads.

[peoriapeoriawhereart]

Good catch.

Abbreviations are going to happen anywhere you are paying by the letter.

[siderea]

What I clicked through to say. Either personal ads or "escort" (prostitution) ads.

That said, I think I have an 1980s book on censorship in the US that has a chapter on porn featuring plus-size models, that discusses the market for it and its subculture in some detail. I'll go check.

ETA: Okay, Bound and Gagged: Pornography and the Politics of Fantasy in America by Laura Kipnis is from 1996, so later than I thought, but in any event, neither the acronym BBW nor its expansion appears in the chapter on Fat Admirer porn.

[delight]

My mother is a hobbyist lexicographer, but she is not answering her texts!

[conuly]

Egads!

Well, when she does, butter her up.

[melannen]

What in particular is making you dubious about the canonical story? BBW magazine appears to have had a valid trademark on it going back to 1979, so it seems unlikely to me that it was in common use in some other kind of publishing before that, or there would have been issues with the trademark. (Also, 1979 predates the real explosion of VHS porn, so there wouldn't have been the same kind of categories.) And Google Books has no relevant pre-1979 uses, so it probably wasn't in wide usage at least - even the early 1980s uses directly reference the magazine.

If it does predate 1979, I would have guessed personal ads before porn, but the basic newspaper archives aren't giving anything relevant either.

[melannen]

I can check the premium newspaper archives at work tomorrow, but if it's not in personal ads, then I think the most likely earlier usage would have been locally in Fat Pride groups, since that's what BBW magazine was coming out of; if you were lucky you might be able to find a zine or NAAFA newsletter or something in an archive, but the official histories of Fat Pride also seen to credit Carole Shaw, so I'm not sure it would be worth looking that hard. (This surprisingly well-aged 1978 WaPo article about Fat Pride doesn't mention it, for example, despite defining things like "FA" for "Fat Admirer".) (Fat Can Be Beautiful, 1974, namechecked in the article, doesn't mention it either, and you'd think with that title it would.)

Thanks for pricking my curiosity on this, by the way - I knew nothing about NAAFA or the early history of fat pride before now, and I'm glad I learned!

[conuly]

I don't know why she is dubious. I'm not particularly dubious except for my general awareness that people often cite themselves as the originator of a phrase when really, they're not. Most often this is probably because they don't recollect hearing it used earlier rather than because they're being deliberately dishonest.

When the only source is them saying "we originated it" - or, worse yet, "our founder originated it", I consider that scanty but not ipso facto evidence of wrongness.

[melannen]

Okay, I went and checked the fancy newspaper archive at work. It looks like the full phrase "Big Beautiful Woman" was heavily used in Lane Bryant ads in the winter of '72 to '73 (Can't like because it's a pay archive, but if you can find any Lane Bryant print ad from that period it will almost definitely be on there). After that it's still used sporadically in Lane Bryant ads through the '70s, and gets picked up by a lot of local Big and Tall-type places as well, until by '77 or so it's somewhat regularly being used in fashion advertising and journalism as a euphemism for plus-size.

So the magazine didn't coin that. Lane Bryant does seem to be the origin of the phrase; before that back to 1950 it's used very occasionally in things like reviews of opera performances, but I don't get the impression it's a stock phrase at that point, and it's being used just as often for tall, skinny women as fat ones.

I still haven't found any unambiguous pre-magazine usage of the BBW acronym to meant "Big Beautiful Woman", but it's harder to search on as it's used for a lot of other things, like B'Nai Brith Women, and something in the stock listings and something in the (non-porn) movie listings, plus it also comes up in bad OCR a lot. Doing my best to filter those out I didn't find anything that looked like it would mean a lovely fat woman, but I can't guarantee I didn't miss it. The first clear usage I found in a personal ad wasn't until 1987, at least ten years after SWF and SWM start showing up, although I don't think the archive includes any of the singles-only ad rags, so probably there's several years' lag there.

[conuly]

You're a doll, thanks.

[conuly]

I texted the info to my sister, btw, but no replies yet.

[ethelmay]

Ad in Good Housekeeping, 1977: https://books.google.com/books?id=F9sxAQAAIAAJ

[conuly]

If you say so, but I can't load a preview. *squints*

[thewayne]

I don't know how it works, but Google has a feature that lets you search through Books or Scholar to look at word usage frequency that goes back by year. It's done through their book scanning, and they've scanned literally millions of books in libraries. So that's one possible route to explore.

[conuly]

You're right... I could use the ngram viewer for that.

[thewayne]

There ya go!  I didn't remember the name, but my wife uses it occasionally.

[conuly]

It's not the sort of thing I'd normally use it for, and I can't see the proper citation, but it certainly does show up prior to 1979. Indeed, I see it floating around by 1961.

[thewayne]

Interesting!

[conuly]

Of course, without seeing the actual text I have to acknowledge that it's possible this is some sort of transcription error, but I'm sufficiently satisfied to conclude it was in the ether by then.