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Etymology Question

When did "kick-up" become an adjective?

I ask because I get a lot of porn spam using it that way in the subject line (e.g., "kick-up video of Mariah Carey").

Do people who are into this stuff commonly use that phrase? I've never heard of it in any other context. The only Google hit for "kick-up" that seems pertinent is this column by Mark Morford, which is basically a spam dump of his inbox. And it's not even in the top ten hits. The vast majority of them are a verb (as I would expect). I would have thought there'd be something in the Urban Dictionary, but no.

So is it some new usage that some spammer made up, and it's supposed to be obvious what it means? Anyone more hip than me (i.e., almost everyone) have any idea where this comes from?

[Update in the afternoon]

Heh. Google works fast. This post is now number seven in a search for "'kick-up' adjective."

 
 

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2 Comments

Josh Reiter wrote:

That isn't a phrase I've heard before either. Not sure if humans think its hip but evidently there is a botnet out there that thinks it is. Or, at least to the point that it is a phrase that circumvents spam filters effectively.

Jay Manifold wrote:

I suppose we've passed some kind of threshold when spambots can introduce slang into human languages. I await the sudden pop-cultural relevance of, say, "coliseum eigenstate" or "osmium chorale," or, more ambitiously, "deuteron transshipping numeral armoire propaganda consular introit conquistador." (source)

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This page contains a single entry by Rand Simberg published on May 14, 2008 7:47 AM.

Feel The Love was the previous entry in this blog.

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