the act itself was also very informal and jocular. here's something McCawley once wrote, under a pseudonym pretending to be a Maoist critiquing McCawley

"This note is concerned with a counterexample to the outrageous claim
made by the bourgeois imperialist linguist McCawley. . . . Consider the
idiomatic sense of shove X up Y’s ass. As is well known, Y must be coreferential to the indirect object of the next higher clause (including the
deleted indirect object of a deleted performative verb)"