Two words from very different reaches of the English wordhoard that I’ve recently encountered:
1) In Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet, which my wife and I will be reading at night well into 2027, I hit the word barathea, which meant nothing to me (although I had seen it before, since I’ve read Lucky Jim at least twice). The OED (entry from 1933) says:
A cloth of a fine texture composed of a silk warp and woollen weft, also of cotton and wool and entirely of wool.
1862 Cobourg, paramatta, barathea, reps, cords, cloths.
International Exhibition: Illustrated Catalogue of Industrial Department vol. II. xxi. §39581897 Venetian crape..has taken the place of the old baratheas, Balmorals, bombazines, &c.
Daily News 30 October 6/51954 His lavender barathea trousers swayed gracefully with his walk.
K. Amis, Lucky Jim: A Novel ix. 981963 All ranks will receive a second suit of the No. 2 khaki service dress, of 22 oz. barathea.
Guardian 15 March 1/4
The stress is on the penultimate (/barəˈθiːa/), and it’s “Of unknown origin.”
2) Doreen St. Félix’s New Yorker piece (archived) on the Swedish singer Zara Larsson (of whom I was unaware) is written throughout in an idiom that presumes knowledge I lack (“hallucinations of a type of two-thousands diva,” “the main-girl-hierarchy talk resurging in pop circles”), but where it lost me completely was with “…her dancers, in pum-pum denim shorts and tank tops like Fly Girls, introduced themselves through a shabooya roll call.” It turns out that What the hell does “shabooya roll call” mean?? has been addressed at Reddit, the answer being “Its an old African Amer chant made famous in the Spike Lee movie GET ON THE BUS.” You can see the movie clip here; it’s from 1996, which shows you how long I haven’t been with it.
Oh, and for those who might be interested, A ‘Game Show’ That’s Basically Dropout For Word Nerds Is The Funniest Thing I’ve Watched In Years. Not, alas, available here in the US. (Via MeFi.)
Even though it’s just a stub, Wikipedia does a rather better job of explaining and its first reference even shows through diagrams how weaving accomplishes the grainy / pebbly appearance without going as far as having ribs.
NB that “Get on the Bus” was notably less successful at the box office than most of Spike Lee’s earlier films and many of his subsequent films, so “made famous by” may be a bit of a stretch. I certainly don’t assert that hat was actually still “with it” by ’96, merely that you could not have assumed in ’96 that everyone who was “with it” had seen that film and would thus recognize references to it. There was apparently a 2012 episode of “The Office” with a parodic homage to the “Get On the Bus” scene, although maybe that was cut from the as-aired episode and then eventually put out on the internet as a bonus outtake? Did that presuppose that the 2012 audience would understand the allusion?
I’m glad to have my withitude provisionally and to a certain extent restored!
i haven’t seen Get On The Bus, but i do remember “shabooya roll call” as a thing in that rough time period – i’m a bit stumped at where i’d’ve run into it. i don’t think i’d heard much new orleans secondline music in person (which would’ve been my first guess), but i had seen some step shows, so maybe that’s where.
i am also trying to decide what novel has a character named barathea shabooya. it’s probably just a Thieves’ World short story, though.
You seem to be ‘with’ New Zealand TV comedy far ahead of me. The first paragraph’s list of game shows I didn’t recognise any of. (HIGNFY, UK edition is what I watch.)
The third paragraph’s two names I didn’t recognise. The people appearing in the clip I didn’t recognise. (Must be some sense of ‘comedian’ I wasn’t previously aware of.) Frankly I found it cringingly embarrassing.
New Zealand TV is terrible. I don’t have a TV. I watch overseas stuff on Youtube.
Sorry.
At least hat was not so out of it as to need an exegesis of https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pum_pum. (I will say that I’m a bit skeptical of the “possibly” Akan etymology offered.)
Although perhaps the extended NP https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pum-pum_shorts#English is not entirely compositional in meaning?
I too am without it, but Google seems to like my guess that “main-girl hierarchy” is a typo for “man-girl hierarchy”, which appears to refer to Adobe Stock and Shutterstock “motion graphic videos” of a businesswomen dancing in triumph over the businessman she has defeated, which is the opposite of what I expected it to mean.
It does seem that “main girl” is an established NP with various meanings, so I would remain open to the possibility that a hierarchy among multiple main girls is certainly possible.
The Green’s entry for “main girl (n.),” BTW, just cross references to “main bitch (n.).”
Yeah, I think I’ve seen “main girl,” so I wouldn’t assume a typo.
Wikipedia may be mistaken on the 1840s origin of barathea. The Times [London] Friday, August 9, 1793, page 4, column 4, bottom announces a bankruptcy sale of stock from a “Mercer and Button Seller” listing many kinds of cloth including “Baratheas.”
Nice antedate!
The Observer [London] May 20, 1838 1/5 “….received from his Agent in Paris…Baratheas….”
British Newspaper Archive–messy non-subscription preview only–Nov. 6, 1752 [?], Caledonian Mercury [Midlothian, Scotland] “…Cloths…Baratheas…”
Gale [more reliable than the above preview], Caledonian Mercury [Edinburgh, Scotland], June 27, 1808, “…Barathea…Silk…”
New Zealand TV is terrible
Brokenwood? Perhaps not to your taste.
perhaps the extended NP https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pum-pum_shorts#English is not entirely compositional in meaning?
to my eye, it’s a patwa calque of “booty shorts” that has migrated back across the lect/register continuum into englishes that are closer to ‘standard’. “booty” in this sense now has its meanings centered on “ass”, but in the 1920s (if we can trust carl van vechten*, which on this i think we can) it was either genitally centered or ambiguous**. and the shorts themselves are basically the same***.
.
* the glossary in his harlem novel defines “boody” and “hootchie-pap” circularly.
** perhaps with a split in black and white usage parallel to the divergence between british and u.s. meanings of “fanny”.
*** source: nyc jouvay, ~2005 to present.
Not to be confused with Shipoopi.
The OED (entry from 1933)
[pedantic] Burchfield added the last two quotations in the 1972 Supplement, although he took the etymology, definition, and older quotations unchanged from the 1933 edition.
Merriam-Webster says “from Barathea, a trademark”, FWIW.
Merriam-Webster says “from Barathea, a trademark”, FWIW.
Hm. Well, there seems to have been such a trademark in 1903, but from SG’s cites the word is considerably older.
I don’t know what this Latin barathea might have to do with anything:
(From Specimen inaugurale de milite sano conservando … by Maximilian Joseph Silberling, 1780.)
There was also a Dutch surname:
(From Decreeten van de vergadering van het provinciaal bestuur van Holland, Vol. 12-13, 1798.)
It does seem that “main girl” is an established NP with various meanings, so I would remain open to the possibility that a hierarchy among multiple main girls is certainly possible.
I would assume that “main girl” is an alteration of “main character” (cf. main character syndrome).
The “main-girl-hierarchy” passage is
St. Felix seems to associate with the rapidity that Robert Bly favored in poetry, and she provides no paragraph break, much less anything explicit, that might tell you whether the ma(i)n-girl hierarchy is associated with breaking out of the Khia asylum or with Larsson’s contemplation of her ambitions (in which I don’t see any scheming). It could be the former and “man-girl hierarchy” if it goes without saying that the jail with the holding cell for middling female singers is manned by businessmen and that Larsson is triumphing over them by breaking out. It could be the latter if “main girl” means female pop star and St. Felix sees levels of success for them as a hierarchy in which Larsson hopes to reach the stadium level. Readers who know what kind of talk is resurging in pop circles might be able to tell. But I’m suggesting that the existence of “man-girl hierarchy” hints at the typo reading.
I don’t see any evidence for the existence of “man-girl hierarchy” as a standing phrase.
Machine translators read paludosa barathea desiccare as a typo for paludosa barathra desiccare, “to drain the swampy pits”. Seems like a reasonable guess here.
This recent explication of “Khia asylum” (not a phrase I knew) says that its inmates are not “middling” but more what one would have traditionally called one-hit wonders who have failed to replicate that earlier flash-in-the-pan success. But it also says that the “most recent and notable escape [from this asylym] was Zara Larsson,” so we’ve got rival characterizations of the same thing or maybe of Ms. Larsson’s prior career.
https://www.uicradio.net/post/the-khia-asylum
To rozele’s point about the semantic evolution of “booty” over the last century, Green’s has entries suggesting that both buttocks-centered senses and genital-centered senses continue to coexist. “Booty call” is a fairly recent (coined 1990’s, reportedly) NP that perhaps focuses on the latter sense.
I don’t see any evidence for the existence of “man-girl hierarchy” as a standing phrase.
No? Google showed me the kind of videos I mentioned.
@J.W.B.: I see that the blog post you cited says one Hailee Steinfeld “has potential to become a main pop girl.” So maybe “main girl” can be applied to pop stars.
Khia was certainly a one-hit wonder* but the article seems to say having a few hits and then disappearing from the charts can also qualify one for the Khia asylum.
*At that time (2002 apparently) I livied in an apartment with very poor soundproofing. My neighbors spent a couple weeks traveling and, intentionally or not, left a radio tuned loudly to “New Mexico’s party station”. I heard “My Neck My Back” over and over. Also over. Just imagine.
“Khia asylum” sends to treat “asylum” as a place of confinement rather than a place of safety. I propose “Khia gulag” instead.
I can’t see how a “main-girl hierarchy” works. In my naive imagination, if you’re not at the top of the hierarchy you’re not the main girl.
@mollymooly: the problem of course is that people committed to an asylum for their own safety but against their own will (since they are typically ordered confined based at least in part on an assessment that they are not capable of making reasonable decisions in their own self-interest) quite understandably think of it as a place of confinement.
Some Irish history here: https://stfinanshospital.com/uncategorized/killarney-district-lunatic-asylum/
No? Google showed me the kind of videos I mentioned.
Google is always going to show you something; I saw those videos, but all that proves is that that’s the kind of video you get if you search on that phrase. I repeat, I can find no evidence that it actually is a phrase.
and reciprocally, to JWB’s point: “booty” certainly partakes in the metonymy of the lower regions, which also shows up in less euphemized idioms like “piece of ass”.
I repeat, I can find no evidence that it actually is a phrase.
OK, I see what you mean. Those sites with the videos show lists of keyworks that include the trigram “man girl hierarchy”, but the words aren’t connected to each other.
So we’re back to the possibility that the author means some sort of ranking or level of success of female pop singers or something. Though it seems she says such discussions are resurgent, though I’d have thought they were perennial, and she finds them “tired”, including Larsson’s thoughts on being able to play stadiums some day, which seems strange to me—why wouldn’t a pop singer put that into a song?
I agree, but as I say, the entire essay presupposes an acquaintance with a cultural world that is alien to me; it’s as if my grandfather had tried to read a 1969 issue of Creem.
Back to another lexicographic question from upthread, I noted that Green’s first entry for “booty shorts” is not until 2008, which seemed rather late and indeed you can find hits in google books from ’98 or ’99, but no earlier than that. Although it may be an NP that was in use well before it got into the sort of text in the google books corpus, of course. By contrast, you can find hits earlier than that in that corpus for “pum pum shorts,” maybe initially tracing back to this 1992 song title, although I don’t have a good sense whether the record was released at the time outside Jamaica. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PXWmXbgsakc So that raises a possible question re which is a calque of which.
It is somewhat sobering to realize that it is now 37 years since the release of the debut N.W.A. album, whose first single included the memorable line “sweating all the bitches in the biker shorts.”* Which, as fashion historians know, came much further down the thigh than booty shorts, but were also tighter/clingier.
*As well as other memorable lines, including but not limited to “Do I look like a motherfucking role model?” The “sweating all the bitches” line was apparently appropriated w/o credit (maybe short enough to be fair use?) in a circa 2002 song by some probably-lame Canadian rock band for the soundtrack of that Spider-Man movie I never bothered to see.
Thanks to the kind help of colleague “Quote Investigator” the 1752 usage of Baratheas is confirmed and shown here:
https://x.com/QuoteResearch/status/2049260219390140758
in a circa 2002 song by some probably-lame Canadian rock band for the soundtrack of that Spider-Man movie I never bothered to see.
Gotta love the faux-judiciousness of “probably-lame”. Apart from that, you seem to refer to Nickelback and Hero. But there are no bitches in the lyrics.
“Are we havin’ fun yet ?”
Brokenwood? Perhaps not to your taste.
Can I ask any passing Russianists how famous is Svetlana Platz?
Any New Zealander, let alone a detective, would know no household in rural NZ uses natural gas/it’s always LPG.
It’s not Morse, is it?
@Stu: There are in my estimation a non-zero number of definitely non-lame Canadian rock bands, since statistical generalizations are of course not 100% predictive of the variousness of reality. But FWIW I was referring to https://genius.com/Sum-41-what-were-all-about-lyrics. Perhaps they are lagging behind Nickelback in extending their fame to the vicinity of Cologne?
@JWB: Even before Spotify and Soundcloud, vinyl ensured that physical proximity to concert venues confers no advantage. Actually I recently discovered that a lot of music happens in formerly industrial areas of Cologne across the Rhine. I bought tickets to a Geese gig in May but had to miss it.
I want to mention that “shabooya roll call” shows up regularly in tv shows and movies. I’ve seen it on The Office, and on It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, frequently spoken by Frank, one of the main characters, when he sees a woman he finds attractive. It can also be heard in everyday life at picnics, sporting events, family reunions, and on road trips as an ice-breaker or a way to get people to remember each other’s names. Shabooya roll call is very much alive and current.
Does ‘Midlothian’ here mean ‘Edinburgh’? I think so, or you’d have to specify *whose* cross out of the various other towns and villages (‘at his Shop opposite to the Cross’). But if so, why not just say so?
Whim: Thanks! But I don’t watch The Office or It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and I haven’t been to picnics or sporting events in many years, so I’m completely out of it.
Jen: “The Caledonian Mercury was a newspaper in Edinburgh, Scotland, published three times a week between 1720 and 1867.”
AntC: I hadn’t seen that bit, and it strikes me as hilarious. Brokenwood is, at any rate, a distinctly cosy crime show that doesn’t claim to be Morse, only to be good entertainment.
(BTW “cosy” isn’t in my spellcheck, but “cozy” seems wrong to me.)
Brokenwood is, at any rate, a distinctly cosy crime show that doesn’t claim to be Morse, only to be good entertainment.
I agree; my wife and I watched a couple of seasons and enjoyed it.
I’ve only ever seen cozy; it’s just one of the few words with a redundant Z, like freeze, froze, frozen.
I thought “cosy” went better with “crime story” for some reason.
A horrible thought: Did AntC miss the joke because he’s never heard of Sylvia Plath?
50 Euros say that AntC knows full well who Plath is. Give the guy a break. She’s named explicitly in the dialog. It’s a lame play on names in any case, which I didn’t get either because I stopped watching the instant “Svetlana Platz” was uttered/captioned.
Also I don’t care because that’s all part of compegghet (compulsory eggheaderosexual) reading. I spurn this now because MM romance is much more interesting. Dorothea Casaubon is dead to me, Lucky Jim too.
“cozy” is generally dominant in AmE, “cosy” in BrE. However, in specific collocations, “cosy crime” is usually with s, but “cozy mystery” usually with z (according to ngrams). Go figure.
@mollymooly: To add to what J.W. said, Khia pronouncies her name to rhyme with “Jeremiah”, so maybe one reason “asylum” was chosen instead of “gulag”, “jail”, etc., is the vowel repetition.
@DM: I find it hard to consider “z” redundant in “freeze” and “froze”, considering the pronunciations of “geese” and “close” (adjective). I can’t think of any examples comparable to “frozen”, though.
Brian Aldiss, whose high repute as an arbiter elegantiae for science fiction I have never really understood, coined the term “cosy catastrophe” for (e.g.) the works of John Wyndham:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apocalyptic_and_post-apocalyptic_fiction#Cozy_catastrophe
From which examples, we learn that Aldiss lacked emotional imagination, however much he may have possessed of other kinds.
He also wrote
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Report_on_Probability_A
which is not really forgiveable.
True – those are the irregular ones.
…yeah. If I wanted to read fiction inspired by a fundamental misunderstanding of quantum physics, I’d learn proper Epic Greek and read the Astronautilia.
Jerry F.: If you want a word rhyming with “frozen” but with an /s/ rather than /z/ in the pronunciation, I nominate “bosun.” Which admittedly has a wacky backstory. If you don’t like the “u” in the spelling, I suspect the Sinitic given name Bosen (博森) is pronounced with an /s/ although probably the second-syllable vowel is unreduced.
there seems to have been such a trademark in 1903, but from SG’s cites the word is considerably older.
I wonder if Merriam-Webster mistook a trademark like that for the origin of the word.
From a reminiscence about the RAF, barathea, and the English textile industry:
Did AntC miss the joke because he’s never heard of Sylvia Plath?
Hi Roger, yes of course I know who is Sylvia Plath.
Perhaps the crime-scene photographer with the atrocious Russian accent turns out to be the murderer, and this is some attempt to throw the ‘tec off the scent-of-gas. But any watcher could have rapidly googled Svetlana Platz during the ad break [**]. One of the reasons I don’t enjoy Agatha Christie is because her plots are filled with jarring implausibilities.
Lest you think I sampled only that clip, I did watch several. I thought that one illustrated best why I won’t be watching the show.
[**] Which on NZ TV add up to twenty minutes out of the hour. Plus the infill-show then feels it has to recap what you were watching just before the ads in case your attention wandered. There’s often also some sort of spurious cliff-hanger just before the ad break. So out of an hour’s watching you’re lucky to get thirty minutes ‘content’.
Did I mention NZ TV is terrible?
Which on NZ TV add up to twenty minutes out of the hour.
Good lord. The mind boggles.
@David Eddyshaw: I have a very negative view of Aldiss from an esthetic viewpoint. He wrote some good fiction, and I recommended Cryptozoic! here a while back. I can’t see myself reading any more of his writing, however. An Island Called Moreau was bad on so many levels, it soured me on him forever. It was incompetently researched (Aldiss was unable to write even vaguely convincing Americans), horribly edited (for example, sepatately claiming the original Moreau sued Wells for libel, yet also died as he did in Wells’ book), and, most importantly, utterly morally repugnant. The pro-pedophilia material was just ghastly.
Good lord. The mind boggles.
I know. Yet it’s not reasonable to expect a population of ~5.3 million spread very thin to support five free-to-air TV stations, plus umpty satellite channels, especially when we’ve nearly all got fibre to the door.
Even the state-owned channels are expected to operate at arm’s length as commercial enterprises. Any whisper of the State trying to rationalise the situation would be too much of a political interference hot-potato.
So I applaud and defend to the death Prime/Sky Open’s making of local content [**]. Just providing I don’t have to watch it.
Say it very quietly, but Radio NZ public service broadcaster is state-funded to provide a national news service, including photos and some video on their website. All TV stations draw on its syndicated feed. Otherwise there’d be no current affairs reportage coming from outside the major [***] cities.
[**] Actually Aus-owned.
[***] that is a relative term.
Television in NZ has long been primitive and backwards. Colo[u]r tv first became a thing there significantly later than in yer other “Anglosphere” places, and “In February 1975 [when colour was brand-new], black-and-white televisions sets cost on average $350 (equivalent to $3,900 in December 2021) while colour television sets cost on average $840 (equivalent to $9,400 in December 2021).” I assume this is why this 1974ish vintage footage of NZ’s first great glam-rock band (starting about 16 seconds into the clip) is in black and white. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NvtuC8a_nsI
@AntC: I watch Brokenwood a year late but without commercials. Perhaps this improves my opinion of it. (So that’s why the episodes are 42 minutes long!)
The actress with the “atrocious Russian accent” (her character is a forensic scientist) is Romanian (but the character is Russian). And the scene is, of course, an invocation of the common trope that the Russians think they invented everything. (I suspect Ms. Ionda relishes satirizing Russians.)
The mind boggles.
I thought it was very close to that in the US? The BBC certainly used to run a lot of ‘hour long’ US shows in 45 minute slots
Jen, you’re quite right. Even 45 years ago, when I lived in San Diego, I used to try to pull in Mexican television for the pleasure of watching shows with only two minutes of ads every half-hour, like American TV when I was a boy 20 years earlier.
I can’t speak to Rodger C.’s boyhood, but by mine it was a U.S. cliche-and/or-industry practice that a “half-hour” episode of a prime-time network television program typically had an actual running time of 22 minutes, allowing 8 other minutes for commercials plus other miscellaneous stuff (public service announcements and promotion of the network’s/station’s other upcoming programming). My recollection of early ’80’s West German tv, FWIW, is that the way in which the commercials were intermixed with the substantive programming was much “lumpier” than US practice. Always helpful to be reminded in however quotidian a context that the way in which your culture habitually does something is not the universal human default.
The public-owned broadcaster in Austria does not interrupt movies; and the main evening news are followed by a minute or so of commercials, then the weather, and then a solid 18 or so minutes of commercials.
I thought it was very close to that in the US? The BBC certainly used to run a lot of ‘hour long’ US shows in 45 minute slots
Ah, you may be right. It’s been so long since I watched network television I’ve forgotten the ancient horrors.
By some sort of cosmic coincidence (or not-so-accidental marketing), Radio NZ’s website has a puff piece for the Spelling Bee show. It’s been re-branded as “true blue Aussie”. (They steal all our stuff. In this case they’re welcome, but we’d have liked John Clark back.)
I asked somebody who I usually take to be relatively ‘with’ it in NZ. (Yooffull enough to still be a student.) Never heard of Guy Montgomery or the Spelling show. But then also rarely watches network TV. Her go-to comedians are Jimmy Carr and Graham Norton.
Quite possibly NZ network TV is played only in Nursing homes and Doctors’ waiting rooms.
@AntC: Not only in NZ. It looks like the average age of viewers of network TV in Germany is nearer to 80 than to 70, and even many of those have stopped watching most shows at the time they are scheduled – my mom, who’ll turn 83 this month, pulls up her favorite shows from the network’s Mediathek and watches only sports live.
My recollection of early ’80’s West German tv, FWIW, is that the way in which the commercials were intermixed with the substantive programming was much “lumpier” than US practice
Yep. On the public stations, commercials were only allowed between 6-8 PM. Before that was the children’s program – no polluting of young minds with commercials! After eight, the “main” program started – not to be disrupted. In that late afternoon / early evening slot they showed soaps or lighter crime shows, and never was a show interrupted by commercials. The first time I saw a TV show interrupted by a commercial, I was shocked. The commercial blocks between the shows went on for what seemed quite a while, interspersed with short cartoon clips; the Mainzelmännchen of the ZDF (still going on) were quite popular when I was a child.
This all changed when private TV stations were introduced in the early 80s; they had much less limitations on when they could show commercials, but the rules for the public stations remained the same for a long time; the reason being that they were (and still are) financed by a fee, while the private stations had to rely on advertising for their revenue.
Even Netflix now wants to imitate network television. The “premium” (vel sim) subscription will soon include ads interrupting the films, as I have read. I have had that subscription for many years, but will throw out the lot before reverting to usa customer submissiveness.
I suppose the desire to maximize profit explains the increep of ads. I would pay even more than I already do, as “compensation for missed ad revenue”, but that’s not how Netflix managers compute, apparently.
Everybody’s tastes and tendencies are solicited and hyped. You can’t order a pizza without being asked endless questions after delivery, as to what you liked or didn’t, whether you would recommend the place to your friends, and so on.
Appreciation and thankfulness are hounded out of the room.
Last month, Stu mentioned used “compegghet,” and I meant to respond but gradually forgot why I had left open a tab with this thread in my browser. However, something jogged my memory the other day, so here’s what caught my eye at the time.
Stu used his nonce word as an adjective, which would have been my natural sense for how to use the real term comp het (space optional) as well. After all, het, short for “heterosexual” is definitely an adjective. (The more common clipping hetero can be either adjective or noun, but the adjective seems to be significantly more common.) However, the one time I have actually encountered comp het in a serious conversation,* it was as a noun phrase, short for “compulsory heterosexuality” (or perhaps “compulsory heteronormativity,” although that phrase seems kind of redundant). Urban Dictionary confirms that it is a noun phrase. (See here for my disappointment with the reliability of Urban Dictionary.)
* I’m not sure I would really prefer to have had the conversation thirty-five years ago, but it might have saved a lot of anguish for both of us.
Earliest hit for the latter formulation in the google books corpus seems to be from 1996: “This not only consigns women to the sphere of the imaginary; it also provides a syntax of a compulsory heteronormativity.” The writer* is talking about Derrida’s description/analysis of a scene in Rousseau.
*This fellow: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Goldberg The quote is from a chapter in an anthology volume that was apparently reworked from an earlier journal article that may not be in the google books corpus but would have been presumably at least a little earlier than ’96.
“comp het” as an abbreviation is i think fairly recent. “compulsory heterosexuality”, as an analytic concept, originated with adrienne rich’s classic 1980 essay Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence”. the essay has been the subject of a lot of elaboration and debate over the past forty-six years, but a version of the concept (though often reduced to more-or-less a more forceful phrasing for “heteronormativity”) remains important for queer (and especially lesbian) social analysis.
US half-hour sitcoms on Irish TV in the 80s had a single ad break in the middle. You could infer where other breaks in the original US broadcast had occurred from the cast-freeze—sting—establishing-shot—sting—cast-unfreeze sequence. I wonder if newer edits for box sets and streaming services now trim some of that.