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"If I Can't Sell It, I'll Keep Sittin' On It," which dates to 1936, is, of course, a song about an easy chair.
Half the posts in this thread I've made are about expressions that are older than I thought. I don't know if there's a thread for that or not but here's another one.
This one came from a U.S. Army Manual dated 1907. In a chapter on combat on page 38, it says "Keep cool," among other things. I wonder how old that expression is?
Almost everything - ideas, inventions, expressions (as you point out), technology, etc. - is older or has older antecedents than is usually thought. And as time moves forward, the origin date of things tends to move back even farther as an older "example" (book reference, video, radio tape, etc.) is "discovered" that pushes the "discovery" date deeper into history.
Separately, "cool" is the one expression that is, well, always cool. "Hip," "happening," "the cat's pajamas," "groovy," and more recently "the bomb" and many others all had their moment of being and meaning (something close to) "cool," but they faded. Somehow, "cool" is always in, always cool. Odd that it has such staying power.
Pursers and Matradee's on the Titanic complained about the young socialites and their yapping little dogs they carried in their purses! As the old saying goes, the more things change, the more they remain the same.There was an article in the New York Times from November 6, 1922 about a girl wearing pajamas and walking several cats on leashes down 5th Avenue.
Apparently both "cat's pajamas" and "publicity scheme" were nascent expressions.
Alas, the article is behind a paywall.
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9C05E1DA1F39EF3ABC4E53DFB7678389639EDE&legacy=true
For Coolidge, that amounts to a broad smile. I don't think Presidents have to do that sort of thing anymore.
There was a book and television series, oh, maybe 30 or 40 years ago, entitled "Connections." I was about several modern technologies that owe their development to something that was invented ages ago. The best known one was about the IBM (Hollerith) card was one such thing that developed from something used in weaving. The book needs to be updated a little.
Fats Waller's work is a delightful treasure trove of "slipping naughty stuff past the ofays." In his 1936 tune "Spring Cleaning," Fats departs from the actual lyric to throw in a fruity ad-lib -- "No lady, we can't haul yo' ashes fo' twenty-five cents, that's bad business!" "Hauling one's ashes" in this context had nothing to do with removing the waste products from your antrhacite furnace -- to get one's ashes hauled meant to receive a thoroughly vigorous sexual experience.
Two years later, in a romping big-band tune called "Come and Get It," Waller really pulls out all the stops when he declares "I don't want that turtle-dove-me stuff, I gotta get myself some booty!!" And yes, that meant then exactly, specifically, and graphically, what it means now.
I was routinely called "four eyes" and worse names growing up. Didn't faze me a bit.
In junior high I wrote a short story in which a character who affected a monocle was referred to as "Three Eyes."
I wore glasses but I don't recall being called four-eyes. I had other things that bothered me a lot more; I was skinny. I think there used to be more skinny kids than there used to be. It was even used as a nickname but usually in a good-natured way. But as a schoolboy, it was not something you wanted to be. I didn't really start gaining weight until after I got married.....
There was a kid in my seventh grade class who willingly answered to "Fatso." Times were different.
My dad had a group of the same friends from his depression-era childhood his entire life. Those guys were brutal - by today's standards, horrible political incorrect - to each other. The were mixed ethnically (another lie today, plenty of diversity in his group - but no question, some groups were excluded by the prejudices of the times) and had some pretty harsh nicknames and ways of addressing each other. That said, they were true lifelong friends who stuck together and help each other out through many of life's struggles - while making aggressive fun of their different ethnicities, religions, weights, hairlines, heights, limps, you name it. As a kid, I processed it as harmless banter while seeing the real friendships - still see it that way today in retrospect.