Terms Which Have Disappeared

[LizzieMaine]

Nobody ever calls that pitcher an "aspareen chucker" anymore, based on the idea that a pitcher throwing a fast fastball is "throwing aspirin tablets."

Ned Martin used to say that "Roger Moret can really bring it," but never felt the need to explain what "it" was.

 

[scottyrocks]

Nobody ever calls that pitcher an "aspareen chucker" anymore, based on the idea that a pitcher throwing a fast fastball is "throwing aspirin tablets."

Ned Martin used to say that "Roger Moret can really bring it," but never felt the need to explain what "it" was.

I always understood 'it' as his 'best stuff.'

 

[Upgrade]

This was on the Wikipedia page for cliché from the Punch Almanack for 1885.

Though cliché back then, these turns of phrase are hardly used today.

Full cartoon here.

books.google.com/books?id=2i5urGmfJ5oC&pg=PA163#v=onepage&q&f=false

 

[LizzieMaine]

I always understood 'it' as his 'best stuff.'

In Roger's case, that often meant "thru the backstop screen and into the fourth row."

 

[tonyb]

This was on the Wikipedia page for cliché from the Punch Almanack for 1885.

Though cliché back then, these turns of phrase are hardly used today.

Full cartoon here.

books.google.com/books?id=2i5urGmfJ5oC&pg=PA163#v=onepage&q&f=false

That's more than a little interestin'.

I use many of those phrases, or close variations thereon, in my everyday speech.

A brief treatise on the matter, Lakoff and Lakoff's "Metaphors We Live By," kinda suggests what ought be apparent but apparently isn't, that being that much of our speech and our very ways of thinking are metaphorical. We liken things to other things.

 

[3fingers]

That's more than a little interestin'.

I use many of those phrases, or close variations thereon, in my everyday speech.

A brief treatise on the matter, Lakoff and Lakoff's "Metaphors We Live By," kinda suggests what ought be apparent but apparently isn't, that being that much of our speech and our very ways of thinking are metaphorical. We liken things to other things.

I believe that many of these terms have pretty well disappeared except among Lounge members and their ilk. A coffee shop gathering among a half dozen Loungers would be a trip in a conversational time machine.

 

[tonyb]

I believe that many of these terms have pretty well disappeared except among Lounge members and their ilk. A coffee shop gathering among a half dozen Loungers would be a trip in a conversational time machine.

Maybe so, but I dunno. I suspect that most people I'm likely to encounter in my daily rounds (another metaphor), even the young ones, would know what was meant by "throwing oneself" at a love interest, or to "throw one's head in the air." Same with most of the other phrases cited above. We sweep past people, we go through doors, etc., etc.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Do people still give their supposed social inferiors "the high hat?" "Yahhh, she can't high hat me, I remember when she cleaned the grease trap at Stinson's."

 

[tonyb]

Do people still give their supposed social inferiors "the high hat?" "Yahhh, she can't high hat me, I remember when she cleaned the grease trap at Stinson's."

I have but vague familiarity with that phrase. I'm confident I've heard it in regular conversation (as opposed to in an old movie or something), but I can't recall where or when. Still, even those who had never heard it would quickly deduce its meaning. Or so I would think. And hope.

 

[KILO NOVEMBER]

"Have you seen the well-to-do, up and down Park Avenue
On that famous thoroughfare, with their noses in the air
High hats and Arrow collars, white spats and lots of dollars
Spending every dime, for a wonderful time ..."

 

[Doctor Strange]

That term is used repeatedly by the Italian gang boss (Sol Polito) in Miller's Crossing. Leave it to the Cohn Brothers to unearth great old slang!

"You think that I'm some guinea, fresh off the boat, and you can kick me! But I'm too big for that now. I'm sick a' takin the scrap from you, Leo. I'm a' of marching into this ******* office to kiss your Irish ass. And I'M SICK A' THE HIGH HAT!"

But I think most folks would probably only get its meaning from context. These days, nobody but the likes of us knows a top hat was also called a high hat!

 

[LizzieMaine]

The High Hatters, a popular hot-dance orchestra that recorded extensively for Victor in the late twenties...

Along the same lines, the regular column of nightclub/speakeasy/riotous-twenties-living news in "Judge" magazine thru the same period was called "High Hat."

 

[Fading Fast]

... These days, nobody but the likes of us knows a top hat was also called a high hat!

These days nobody but the likes of us knows that there was a time when the vast majority of men (and women) even wore hats (that were not baseball caps).

 

[vitanola]

"Have you seen the well-to-do, up and down Park Avenue
On that famous thoroughfare, with their noses in the air
High hats and Arrow collars, white spats and lots of dollars
Spending every dime, for a wonderful time ..."

Those are not the lyrics as published. The song was originally about set sepia set cavorting in Harlem on Thursday, the "Bell's night out".

Have you seen the "well-to-do"
Up on Lenox Avenue
On that famous thoroughfare
With their noses in in the air.

High hats, and colored collars
White spats, and fifteen dollars
Spending every dime for a wonderful time!

If you're blue, and you don't know where to go to, why don't you go where Harlem sits
Puttin' on the Ritz

Spangled gowns upon a bevy of "high browns" from down the levy; all misfits
Puttin' on the Ritz

That's where each and every "Lulu-Belle" goes. Every Thursday Evening with her swell beaux (rubbing elbows)

Come with me and we'll attend their jubilee and see them spend their last two bits
Puttin' on the Ritz

The "Park Avenue" lyrics, which don't really make a great deal of sense date from two decades after the publication song, which was written for the Harry Richman vehicle "Puttin' on the Ritz"

 

[Zombie_61]

Do people still give their supposed social inferiors "the high hat?" "Yahhh, she can't high hat me, I remember when she cleaned the grease trap at Stinson's."

Of course they do; they just don't call it that any more.

 

[Upgrade]

High hat regarnered some currency with “Larry’s High Silk Hat” from VeggieTales of all places.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9KqphtT5fs

Though hi-hat is used by drummers to describe a certain type of cymbal.

 

[scottyrocks]

 

[Inkstainedwretch]

It's interesting how status was determined by headgear. "Big wigs" were literally the most important people who wore the biggest wigs. In the Nixonian era "hard hats" meant construction workers and by extension the working class. But in Britain "hard hat" meant the upper class who wore toppers, bowlers and derbys, while "cloth cap" meant workingmen.

 

[KILO NOVEMBER]

Those are not the lyrics as published. The song was originally about set sepia set cavorting in Harlem on Thursday, the "Bell's night out".

Have you seen the "well-to-do"
Up on Lenox Avenue
On that famous thoroughfare
With their noses in in the air.

High hats, and colored collars
White spats, and fifteen dollars
Spending every dime for a wonderful time!

If you're blue, and you don't know where to go to, why don't you go where Harlem sits
Puttin' on the Ritz

Spangled gowns upon a bevy of "high browns" from down the levy; all misfits
Puttin' on the Ritz

That's where each and every "Lulu-Belle" goes. Every Thursday Evening with her swell beaux (rubbing elbows)

Come with me and we'll attend their jubilee and see them spend their last two bits
Puttin' on the Ritz

The "Park Avenue" lyrics, which don't really make a great deal of sense date from two decades after the publication song, which was written for the Harry Richman vehicle "Puttin' on the Ritz"

The Fred Astaire movie, Top Hat, was released in 1935, only five years after the Harry Richman performance. Was someone's social conscience throbbing at the "high hat" attitude it showed to social inferiors? I'd like to know how the lyric was changed. According to the savants on WikiPedia, Irving Berlin wrote the lyrics in 1927, only eight years before Fred Astaire performed it, not two decades.

 

[LizzieMaine]

The lyric was changed in 1946, when "Ritz" was exhumed for use in the Irving Berlin biopic "Blue Skies," which is where Astaire first performed the new words. A lot of sociocultural water had flowed under the bridge in sixteen years, and Berlin had come to feel that his original lyric was racist. It was the same postwar evolution of social conscience that caused Cole Porter to take the Asian ethnic slurs out of "Let's Do It."

You can see Berlin's point of view shifting as early as 1937, when he wrote "Slumming on Park Avenue," a song which suggested it was time for the working class to turn the tables on its Social Betters and start making fun of them for a change. The Thirties changed the worldviews of a lot of people.