Terms Which Have Disappeared

[Stanley Doble]

They used 'boys' the way we use 'guys'. There was even a song, See What The Boys In The Back Room Will Have, even though the youngest 'boy' would have to be of drinking age.

 

[Capesofwrath]

LizzieMaine wrote: "A cake eater is an effette young man who sits languidly around a woman's parlor eating cake and admiring the crease in his trousers while all the real men are out wrestling bears or something. While it wasn't quite the same thing as calling a man a pansy or a nance, it did have a definite edge of dismissing the target as un-masculine."

That's rather similar to a term that used to be used among the officer class in the British Army. A "Poodle Faker" was an officer who was thought to be over-attentive to women. Not exactly a ladies' man or gigolo, but someone who enjoyed ladies company socially in preference to games and sport. (Sport meaning hunting, shooting, and fishing.) I think the term gradually fell by the wayside after Indian Independence in 1947.

An older but similar expression was carpet knight. The sort of knight who preferred the ladies rather than the melee.

 

[Trenchfriend]

Leisure-summershirts with shoulder-straps and breast-pockets are often called "pilot-shirts", in private life, too??

 

[LizzieMaine]

Around here we call those "camp shirts."

 

[LizzieMaine]

Speaking of bowling-alley "pin boys" here's a shot of several of them at work in a bowling alley in Brooklyn in 1910 -- they weren't just "boys," they were little boys seven or eight years old. This photo was taken at 1 AM, according to the caption on the back, which also notes that "Boss kept several younger boys out of the picture." The Gerry Society didn't much care about working-class boys, it seems.

Although mechanical pinsetting machines became popular in the twenties, they still had to be loaded with pins by a pin boy, so the occupation of "pin boy" continued to exist well into the fifties when automatic pinsetters became common. By that point, though, the law had finally caught up with the industry, and pin boys had to be at least sixteen years old in most states.

 

[vitanola]

Speaking of bowling-alley "pin boys" here's a shot of several of them at work in a bowling alley in Brooklyn in 1910 -- they weren't just "boys," they were little boys seven or eight years old. This photo was taken at 1 AM, according to the caption on the back, which also notes that "Boss kept several younger boys out of the picture." The Gerry Society didn't much care about working-class boys, it seems.

Although mechanical pinsetting machines became popular in the twenties, they still had to be loaded with pins by a pin boy, so the occupation of "pin boy" continued to exist well into the fifties when automatic pinsetters became common. By that point, though, the law had finally caught up with the industry, and pin boys had to be at least sixteen years old in most states.

Here in the Midwest the common term for a pin boy was "pin monkey" apparently from the way that they would have to scamper to get their work done quickly enough to avoid an errant ball. My father was a pin monkey when he was in school, as were a few of my friends. The rural town in which I live had a 1910 vintage bowling alley of six lanes which was in operation into the 1970's. It was never profitable enough to have ever been fitted with oin-setting machinery, so there are fifty-year-olds here who worked at this now lost occupation.

 

[Trenchfriend]

"Chemisette"

 

[Stearmen]

Whiz-Bang.

 

[KILO NOVEMBER]

I started this thread with a term I heard in a Dragnet radio show, and now, here's another. "laundry mark". Whenever Sgt. Joe Friday was presented with a John Doe corpse, he'd ask the lab boys if they had found any laundry marks on the victim's clothing.

Before the days of coin-op laundromats, I imagine that single men living urban areas sent all their clothing to a commercial laundry.

 

[LizzieMaine]

There are a lot of crimes from the Era that would go unsolved today because of the absence of laundry marks -- as recently as 1968, Martin Luther King's assassin James Earl Ray was traced thru the laundry marks in underwear found near the crime scene.

It was also common, at least in detective fiction, to trace a suspect from the label in a piece of clothing left at the scene -- but now, in the days of anonymously-made, mass-marketed, Bangladeshi garments, good luck with that.

 

[Fading Fast]

But DNA analysis today (recognizing that it, like everything else in our society, is not perfect and is grist for our political millstone) also makes some crimes solvable that never would have been. I think I am an honest person and like to believe I'd never commit a crime because it is morally wrong, but today, another incentive is that with modern forensics, I have no doubt they would catch me from a drop of DNA somewhere.

 

[LizzieMaine]

The thing I would wonder about with DNA is this -- suppose a garment is found at a crime scene, supposedly belonging to the criminal, and DNA is found on it. But the criminal, let's say, bought that garment at the Goodwill store that morning. Whose DNA is on it -- his, or the original owner's?

I always found that a real flaw in detective fiction -- the assumption that every suspect was the first and only owner of every incriminating bit of evidence. I'd read about Ellery Queen tracking down a killer by the initials stamped on a hatband or the label in an overcoat, but I'd always wonder why he didn't consider the possiblity that those items had been purchased by the criminal from a second-hand store. I'd think you could run into the same sort of situation with DNA evidence.

 

[Fading Fast]

The thing I would wonder about with DNA is this -- suppose a garment is found at a crime scene, supposedly belonging to the criminal, and DNA is found on it. But the criminal, let's say, bought that garment at the Goodwill store that morning. Whose DNA is on it -- his, or the original owner's?

I always found that a real flaw in detective fiction -- the assumption that every suspect was the first and only owner of every incriminating bit of evidence. I'd read about Ellery Queen tracking down a killer by the initials stamped on a hatband or the label in an overcoat, but I'd always wonder why he didn't consider the possiblity that those items had been purchased by the criminal from a second-hand store. I'd think you could run into the same sort of situation with DNA evidence.

Good points. DNA evidence, like any good evidence, needs to be rigorously challenged and part of a total fact pattern. As you noted, TV shows, books, etc., like to have the drama of it all hanging on a "thread," and sometimes one clue leads to solving a crime, but even then, it is usually still a preponderance of evidence, not "one strand of hair," that convicts someone. My girlfriend's brother is a detective - most of my comments here come from years of talking with him about how things happen "in the real world."

 

[Bushman]

I would imagine that the detectives would follow both leads, and would look for a DNA match in their database before proceeding. If the DNA came up with anybody who has had a criminal record, then that would be the lead they pursued first.

 

[dh66]

Reminds me of a story about a friend of mine. About 20 years ago he sold his by then junked up 81 Monte Carlo for a few hundred bucks. About four months later the FBI showed up on his doorstep. Seems the purchaser had never bothered to register the vehicle, and it had turned up in a scrapyard a state over with a body in the trunk. Fortunately he had kept a copy of the bill of sale for tax purposes, but wow, talk about a situation to find yourself in.

Sent from my XT1030 using Tapatalk

 

[tonyb]

And consider also that certain "modern" forensic evidence is not nearly as reliable as a prosecutor might wish us to believe.

I'm reminded of the arson investigator in Texas who never saw a suspicious fire he didn't determine was arson. His findings played a role in the murder conviction of Cameron Todd Willingham, who maintained his innocence of killing his daughters in an arson and refused to cop a plea that would have spared his life.

The New Yorker ran a great piece on this case a few years back. The takeaway was that arson investigations can be as much art as science, and in this case the findings certainly appeared tailored to suit the prosecution's narrative.

It brought to mind the sorts of fictions perpetrated by real estate appraisers a few years back, which played a major role in the market collapse. An experienced real estate agent of my acquaintance told me that he just told the appraisers what number he needed and that was the number he got.

 

[Zombie_61]

Reminds me of a story about a friend of mine. About 20 years ago he sold his by then junked up 81 Monte Carlo for a few hundred bucks. About four months later the FBI showed up on his doorstep. Seems the purchaser had never bothered to register the vehicle, and it had turned up in a scrapyard a state over with a body in the trunk. Fortunately he had kept a copy of the bill of sale for tax purposes, but wow, talk about a situation to find yourself in.

A friend of ours went through something similar several years ago. He used his 1970s-era van as a trade-in to cover part of the down payment on a new pickup truck at a local dealership. Six months later he was contacted by the U.S. Border Patrol, and the agent asked him a number of questions about that van. Once it had been confirmed that he was no longer the legal owner, the agent told him that the vehicle had been confiscated and impounded as evidence because someone tried to use it to smuggle people across the Mexico/California border into the U.S., and the paper trail showed he was still the owner. Subsequent investigation revealed that the dealership had sold the vehicle to a local scrap yard for the value of it's viable parts, and that none of the proper documentation had been filed after that point.

 

[Stearmen]

Then there is poor old Mark Oberholtzer, who traded in his plumbing company truck for a new one. Seems the dealer who promised to remove the logos from the door did not! The truck ended up with terrorist, and on national TV. Mark received thousands of death threats, because idiots thought he sold it to the terrorist!

 

[Fading Fast]

And consider also that certain "modern" forensic evidence is not nearly as reliable as a prosecutor might wish us to believe.

I'm reminded of the arson investigator in Texas who never saw a suspicious fire he didn't determine was arson. His findings played a role in the murder conviction of Cameron Todd Willingham, who maintained his innocence of killing his daughters in an arson and refused to cop a plea that would have spared his life.

The New Yorker ran a great piece on this case a few years back. The takeaway was that arson investigations can be as much art as science, and in this case the findings certainly appeared tailored to suit the prosecution's narrative.

It brought to mind the sorts of fictions perpetrated by real estate appraisers a few years back, which played a major role in the market collapse. An experienced real estate agent of my acquaintance told me that he just told the appraisers what number he needed and that was the number he got.

Honesty, integrity, a full and fair investigation and judgement all take hard work, constant vigilance and people willing to stand up to special interest pressures and "taking the easy way out" mentality. This, IMHO, is true of all human endeavors. Government, Corporations, Unions, families, etc., can and have done great things, but also, all of these entities are always under pressure to protect their reputations, do more with less resources and there are individuals within and without that have venal agendas and will use the organization to advance their personal gain. Fighting back against all of that takes personal courage, energy and conviction. It simply isn't easy to build lasting organizations, processes or systems that have integrity and honesty as their defining and controlling characteristics.

 

[Inkstainedwretch]

On TV, labs return DNA evidence within hours. In reality, the evidence can sit in evidence lockers for months or even years before going to the lab. It might be expedited in a super high-profile case like terrorism or a political assassination, but the labs are swamped and the procedure is exacting and not always reliable. There is now what is called the "CSI syndrome" in which juries will not convict without DNA evidence. They've watched so many TV crime programs that they think DNA evidence is necessary for a conviction. Scientific evidence is convenient for fiction and drama, but police really catch crooks the old-fashioned way: People rat each other out.