American Language Supplement 2

by H. L. Mencken

  1 In England a headliner is a top-liner.

  2 In England in one is in a front cloth.

  3 Often but erroneously written prattfall. The NED traces prat, the buttocks, to 1567 and marks it “origin unknown.” See Pratt on Prat(t) Falls, by Theodore Pratt, Variety, Nov. 29, 1944.

  4 In England he is the conductor.

  5 To play the first spot is to open the show; in England it is to play them in. It is considered undesirable, for the audience is still coming in.

  1 Its location has varied as the show business has moved uptown. Edward B. Marks says in They All Sang; New York, 1935, p. 74, that the term was invented by Monroe H. Rosenfeld, author of Take Back Your Gold, With All Her Faults I Love Her Still, and other masterpieces of the 80s and 90s.

  2 The NED traces vamp in this sense to 1882.

  3 Some specimens of its argot: boat, a train; burr-head, a minstrel; eleven forty-five, the daily parade of the company; excess-baggage, a poor performer; firstie, a novice; high C, a cornetist; lumber-buster, a wooden-shoe dancer; smut, burnt cork; taps, a drummer; and windjammer, a trombonist. There is an amusing account of the curious ways of the old-time minstrels in They All Sang, by Edward B. Marks, before cited.

  4 New York, pp. 120–23.

  5 Especially Mr. Harry Van Hoven.

  6 A reference to the fact that Boston has the strictest censorship in the United States.

  7 A correspondent writes: “The bump is a terrific convulsion in which the lower abdomen, with special emphasis on the mons pubis, is shot suddenly forward while the legs and upper torso remain motionless – a sort of double-jointed, free-wheeling hip action. It may be repeated a number of times while a drum beats out the tempo and the artiste clings to a piece of stage drapery.”

  8 See feeder in the Vaudeville wordlist.

  1 My invention of the sober ecdysiast to denominate a strip-teaser is described in Supplement I, pp. 584–87. It was denounced as snobbish by Gypsy Rose Lee, the queen of the profession, but made its way in both the United States and England. In the Los Angeles Daily News, Sept. 27, 1944, p. 26, it was refined to ecdysiste, apparently suggested by artiste.

  2 Lid is off Strip-Teasing, by Paul Ross, PM, April 1, 1941, p. 23.

  3 The Bigger They Are—, by Lee Mortimer, New York Mirror, Jan. 12, 1941, magazine section, p. 3. Under date of Jan. 17, 1941, Mr. Mortimer wrote to me: “I have never heard hill-horse used during the dozen-odd years I’ve been on Broadway. I asked Jack Lait about it too, but he doesn’t remember it either. [Mr. Lait is editor of the New York Mirror and was formerly a theatrical manager. His connection with the theatre began in 1908.] It seems to me that I first heard big-horses used seven or eight years ago by Earl Carroll at a rehearsal. He was giving a pep talk to the cast.”

  1 Lee Mortimer in the New York Mirror, Feb. 16, 1947.

  2 In the pre-strip-tease age such a pad was called a heart.

  3 It Happened Last Night, Oct. 6, 1941.

  4 Borrowed from the jive vocabulary. Wilson reported in the Evening Post, Sept. 28, 1945, that when he appealed to Toots Shor, a Broadway savant, for precise definitions of square and creep he was told: “A square don’t know from nothin’ and a creep is worse’n a jerk.”

  5 The male ringmaster of a nightclub show is always the master of ceremonies or m.c., and from the latter has come the verb to m.c. In England he is the compère, a French word meaning originally a godfather, but extended in slang to mean a crony or the confederate of a quack.

  6 Many of the female ballet stars are English, but nearly all use Russian names.

  7 It is to be found in The Ballet-Lover’s Pocket-Book, by Kay Ambrose; New York, 1945, and The Borzoi Book of Ballet, by Grace Robert; New York, 1946, pp. 351–62.

  1 The Strange Vernacular of the Box-Office, Oct. 30. See also The Forty Thieves, by Maurice Zolotow, Reader’s Digest, Jan., 1944, pp. 91–94.

  2 American Stage-Hand Language, by J. Harris Gable, Oct., pp. 67–70.

  3 The anonymous author of the Times article says that there are two kinds of buys. One permits a return of 25% of the number brought to the box-office before 7:30 for a night performance and 1:30 P.M. for a matinée; the other is outright, and permits no return of unsold seats.

  4 Schlag is Yiddish (and German) for a blow.

  5 The author of the Times article says that his informants were Ernest A. MacAuley, treasurer of the Forty-sixth Street Theatre, and Joseph Keith, manager of the Leblang Ticket Agency. “Both Mr. MacAuley and Mr. Keith,” he notes, “point out that these expressions are used only in Broadway ticket agencies and box-offices. There are many different idioms used by old-time treasurers, circus, vaudeville and road box-office men and motion picture cashiers that are never heard in the New York legitimate theatres.”

  1 The nautical origin of some of these terms is discussed by S. E. Morison in American Speech, Dec., 1928, p. 124.

  1 There is a bibliography of glossaries of motion-picture terms in Burke’s Literature of Slang, pp. 121 and 122. Not listed there are Neologisms of the Film Industry, by P. R. Beath, American Speech, April, 1933, pp. 73 and 74; Logomachia, by Cecil B. DeMille, Words, Oct., 1936, p. 6; Strange Lingo of the Movies, Popular Mechanics, May, 1937, pp. 722–26; Glossary of Movie Terms, by James Hogan, North American Newspaper Alliance syndicated article, June 5, 1938; The Playwright in Paradise, by Edmund Wilson, New Republic, April 26, 1939; Movie Talk, by Philip H. Bailey, Minicam, June, 1939, pp. 115–18; Hollywood Slang, Woman’s Home Companion, Aug., 1940, p. 8; Pill? Skull Doily? It’s Movie Talk, by Virginia Oakey, Richmond (Va.) News-Leader, April 11, 1942, and Filmese, by Louise Pound, American Mercury, April, 1943, pp. 155 and 156.

  2 To kill the baby means to turn the spot out.

  3 So used in Screen Notables Shun Night Life, by John Scott, Los Angeles Times, Jan. 9, 1938.

  4 I take this from Variety, which probably invented it.

  1 There are 16 frames to a foot.

  2 A very undesirable fault.

  3 Gobo used to be vaudeville argot for a scene played in the dark.

  4 See Supplement I, pp. 641–44.

  5 So called from the name of the Kliegl brothers, inventors of the Klieg arc-light, now obsolete.

  6 From Lupe Velez, a female star.

  1 Bradford F. Swan, in Slang-Minting Film Capital Speaks Its Own Language, Providence Journal, March 3, 1946, says that this is an abbreviation of mitoudt sound in “the heavy dialect of a foreign director.”

  2 Variety always calls it a nabe.

  1 Despite the advent of the talkies they are still sometimes used.

  2 See Supplement I, p. 327, n. 5.

  3 In Origin of Words: Yes Man, San Francisco News Letter & Wasp, June 30, 1939, p. 10, Peter Tamony says that yes-man was invented by T. A. (Tad) Dorgan, the cartoonist, in 1913. It appeared first in a cartoon entitled Giving the First Edition the Once Over, showing the editor and his assistants looking over an edition fresh from the press. The assistants are praising it, and are labelled yes-men. “The extension of the term to indicate assistant directors in motion-picture organizations,” says Mr. Tamony, “was natural. The early 1920s saw the industry rapidly developing to the stupendous, colossal, flamboyant mystery it now is, and the many who strove for fame and fortune did so with hats in hand.” In a short while the late Wilson Mizner was calling Hollywood “the land where nobody noes,” and Variety nominated one of the assistants of Darryl Zanuck, the producer, for the dignity of super-yes-man. Mr. Tamony calls attention to the fact that yes-men were known in the Eighteenth Century as amens, which appeared in the third edition of Grose’s Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, 1796. The term is defined thus: “He said yes and amen to everything; he agreed to everything.” For Dorgan see Tad Dorgan is Dead, by W. L. Werner, American Speech, Aug., 1929, p. 430. Werner does not list yes-men among Dorgan’s coinages. Its possible source in the German jaherr is noted in Supplement I. p. 431.

  1 Autumn Preview, Sept. 25, 1943, p. 465.

  2 New Models in
Words, Nov., 1940, pp. 28 and 29.

  3 Both kinetoscope and kinetograph were used by Thomas A. Edison to designate his original motion-picture machine of 1893.

  4 Movie is not listed in the DAE, but the NED Supplement marks it an Americanism and traces it to 1913. Terry Ramsaye says in Movie Jargon, American Speech, April, 1926, p. 357, that it really goes back to 1906–07. Movie-parlor came in on its heels, along with movie-actor, movie-show, etc. When sound pictures were first heard of they were called speakies, but in 1926, when their production was begun on a commercial scale by Warner Brothers, they became talkies. The Australians call March of Time reconstructions of history thinkies. No short name for colored pictures is in general use.

  5 There are more than twenty annual awards. One goes to the actor adjudged to have given the best performance of the year, another to the actress, a third to the author of the most original screen-play, a fourth to the best photographer, a fifth to the best animated cartoon, and so on. There are also various special awards – for example, one for the most valuable technical improvement of the year, and another (named in honor of the late Irving G. Thalberg) “for the most consistent high quality of production achievement by an individual producer.”

  1 The term has also come into use outside movie circles, always to designate some symbol of merit. See Among the New Words, by I. Willis Russell, American Speech, Dec, 1944, p. 306. Baltimore & Ohio Magazine, Nov., 1945, p. 9: Our Annual Report Wins Oscar (a bronze trophy offered by the Financial World). Editor & Publisher, April 5, 1947, p. 7: Promotion Oscars Awarded to 6 Newspapers (bronze plaques). There are also derivative Edgars and Gertrudes, the former, named for Edgar Allan Poe, going to writers and producers of whodunits, and the latter to writers of Pocket Books which sell 1,000,000 copies. See American Notes & Queries, July, 1946, p. 53, and Saturday Review of Literature, April 26, 1947, p. 24.

  2 Variety calls press-agents flacks, a World War II term for anti-aircraft fire. It was borrowed from the German flak, an abbreviation of fliegerabwehrkanone, anti-aircraft cannon. Agents of extraordinary virulence are blast-artists. They call themselves publicists, public relations counsel or publicity engineers. See Supplement I, pp. 578–79.

  3 Suggested by the name of the Western Associated Motion Picture Advertisers, made up of advertising and publicity men.

  4 From the title of The Sheik, by Edith M. Hull, a sensational novel which made a movie for the late Rudolph Valentino (1895–1926) in 1922. Dwight L. Bolinger reported in The Living Language, Words, Oct., 1937, p. 156, that it was moribund by 1931.

  5 New Name is Coined, Los Angeles Herald, Jan. 30, 1926: “ ‘That girl surely has appeal – she’s a cobra.’ That’s the latest expression one hears around Hollywood.” The title of another Valentino picture, with Nita Naldi as the ophidian.

  6 Cf. Rudyard Kipling’s The Vampire, 1897. The abbreviated noun came into general use in England by 1918 and the verb by 1922, but both seem to have been propagated in the United States from Hollywood.

  7 The early history of this term is obscure. The NED Supplement shows that it had reached England by 1927. Howard C. Rice reported in the Franco-American Review, 1936, that it had reached France as le sex-appeal.

  8 Used by Kipling in Mrs. Bathurst, 1904: “Tisn’t beauty,… or good talk necessarily. It’s just It. Some women will stay in a man’s memory if they once walked down a street.” It was spread in the United States by the press agents of the film version of Elinor Glyn’s Three Weeks, c. 1922. In 1927 she did a movie called It.

  9 A committee organized by press agents awarded the title of Oomph Girl of America to Ann Sheridan, March 16, 1939. See America’s Oomph Girl, by Noel F. Busch, Life, July 24, 1939, p. 64. The term was apparently first used by Walter Winchell, but it was the movie publicists who broadcast it. It aroused a violent discussion when it reached England, a little later. In 1945, when an American manufacturer of footwear tried to register Oomphies as a trade-mark for his products, the Registrar of Trade-Marks refused to grant it, apparently on the antagonistic double ground that oomph had sexual connotations and was a common adjective, and hence not registerable. On Oct. 16, 1946, sitting in the Chancery Division of the High Court, Mr. Justice Raymond Evershed rejected both contentions and ordered the trade-mark registered. See Newsweek, Oct. 28, 1946, p. 44 and Supplement I, pp. 329, 362, 398 and 428.

  10 But Eve Brown says in Champagne Cholly; New York, 1947 (reprinted in Omnibook, May, 1947, p. 155) that this was invented by Maury Paul, for many years the Cholly Knickerbocker of the Hearst papers.

  1 Neologisms, by Dwight L. Bolinger, American Speech, Feb., 1941, p. 66.

  2 Said Westbrook Pegler in his column of June 24, 1947: “The Musicians’ Union in its recent convention adopted a resolution which is significant.… The resolution would permit the expulsion of any member who used or carried on traffic in narcotics.… Because so many of the members are employed in resorts of the underworld and the twilight world of luxurious and expensive dives run by racketeers, but patronized by more or less respectable clients, they are brought very close to the narcotics trade.”

  1 New York, 1944.

  2 The standard piano has a compass of 7 1/4 octaves, or 88 notes.

  3 Profiles: Alligator’s Idol, New Yorker, April 17, 1937, p. 27: “Swing is really just another word for jazz, but it has come to imply hot jazz, as distinguished from the sweet jazz developed by Paul Whiteman, with his violins, muted brasses and soft symphonic effects.” In Jazz is Where You Find It, Esquire, Feb., 1944, Leonard G. Feather said that the standard jazz band at that time consisted of five or six saxophones, four or five trumpets, three or four trombones, piano, guitar, double-bass and drums.

  4 Boogie-woogie is defined by the New College Standard Dictionary, 1947, as “a type of piano blues characterized by a rhythmic ostinato bass with free rhapsodizing in the right hand, composed of numerous short figures in varied rhythms.” The use of blues here is perhaps inaccurate. Blues means a song or instrumental piece of a generally desponding character, like that of many Negro spirituals. The blues laid the foundations for jazz, but they are not necessarily jazz themselves.

  1 Its structure is discussed learnedly in So This is Jazz, by Henry Osborne Osgood; New York, 1926, and by the same author in The Anatomy of Jazz, American Mercury, April, 1926, pp. 385–95. Its history is recounted in Reflections on the History of Jazz, by S. I. Hayakawa, a lecture delivered before the Arts Club of Chicago, March 17, 1945, and later printed as a pamphlet by the author. See also Is Jazz Music?, by Winthrop Parkhurst, American Mercury, Oct., 1943, pp. 403–09.

  2 In Among the New Words, American Speech, Feb., 1944, p. 61, Dwight L. Bolinger traces this term to 1938, and connects it with cornfed. In Corny, the same, Oct., 1946, Marie Sandoz says that it was in use in Western Nebraska c. 1890–1910.

  3 It is discussed learnedly, and with approbation, in the Étude, the trade journal of American music-teachers, Dec., 1943, p. 757, and by Nicolas Slonimsky in Jazz, Swing and Boogie Woogie, Christian Science Monitor, May 20, 1944. Slonimsky says that it was launched by Meade Lewis and Albert Ammons, Negro pianists, at Carnegie Hall, New York, Dec. 23, 1938.

  4 From Louis Armstrong, alias Satchelmouth, alias Satchmo, a famous colored trumpet-player. For his triumphs see Hot Jazz Jargon, by E. J. Nicholas and W. L. Werner, Vanity Fair, Nov., 1935, p. 38, and Jazz, by Robert Goffin; New York, 1946.

  1 For more examples see Presto-Rush, by Arthur Minton, American Speech, April, 1940, p. 124–31; What Every Young Musician Should Know, by Meredith Willson; New York, 1938; From the Baltimore Evening Sun, by R. P. Harriss, American Speech, Oct., 1941, p. 229; The Slang of Jazz, by H. Brook Webb, the same, Oct., 1937, pp. 179–84; A Musician’s Word List, by Russel B. Nye, the same, Feb., 1937, pp. 45–48 and Musical Slang Explained, by Gene Krupa, Chicago Sun, Feb. 7, 1943, p. 28.

  2 I take most of these from Jabber-wocky and Jive, by Nancy Pepper; New York, 1943. Miss Pepper gives some edifying examples of teen-age wit, e.g., “He moved to the city
because he heard the country was at war,” “He took a bicycle to bed so he wouldn’t have to walk in his sleep,” and “He cut off his left side so he would be all right.” See also It’s Swing, by Holman Harvey, Delineator, Nov., 1936, pp. 10–11 and 48–49; Débutante’s Dictionary, Vogue, Nov. 15, 1937, pp. 70 and 144; On the Record, by Carleton Smith, Esquire, Nov., 1938, pp. 95 and 179; Jitterbugs are Poison, Life, Aug. 8, 1938, p. 56; Manhattan Room, New Yorker, Jan. 8, 1938, pp. 34–35; Swing Terms, by S. J. Perelman, New Yorker, Sept. 14, 1940, pp. 18–19; Subdebese, Life, Jan. 27, 1941, pp. 78–79; Jabber-wocky, Time, July 26, 1943, p. 56; Teen-Age Slang, New York Times Magazine, Dec. 5, 1943; Teen Talk: Slanguage, by Bonnie Gay, Baltimore Sunday Sun, Feb. 11, 1945, Sect. A, p. 2; Teen Talk, by Mary Jane Carl, American Weekly, July 21, 1946, p. 15; Dan Burley’s Original Handbook of Harlem Jive; New York, 1944, pp. 133–50 (Burley conducts a column in jive, Back Door Stuff, in the New York Amsterdam News, and has made many contributions to the vocabulary); The New Cab Calloway’s Hepster’s Dictionary; New York, 1938; new editions, 1939 and 1944 (said by Variety, June 22, 1938, to have been written by Ned Williams, a press agent); Hepcats’ Jive Dictionary, by Lou Shelly; Derby (Conn.), 1945, and Really the Blues, by Milton “Mezz” Mezzrow and Bernard Wolfe; New York, 1946, pp. 371–80. The last is extremely interesting and also authoritative, for Mezzrow has functioned successfully as both jazz musician and marihuana pedlar.

  1 The vocabulary of the 1920s, now nearly all archaic, is to be found in Courtship Slang, by F. Walter Pollock, American Speech, Jan., 1927, pp. 202–03. That of the C. C. C. boys of the 1930s is in C. C. C. Speech, by Elwood W. Camp and H. C. Hartman, the same, Feb., 1937, pp. 74–75; C. C. C. Chatter, by Levette J. Davidson, the same, April, 1940, pp. 201–11; C. C. C. Slang, by James W. Danner, the same, April, 1940, pp. 212–13, and an anonymous article in Life, Aug., 1933, p. 9. That of youngsters confined in institutions is in Vocabulary and Argot of Delinquent Boys, by Lowell S. Selling, American Journal of Sociology, March, 1934, pp. 674–77; The Argot of an Orphans’ Home, by L. W. Merry-weather, American Speech, Aug., 1932, pp. 398–404; and The Growth and Decline of a Children’s Slang Vocabulary, by Edmund Kasser, Journal of Genetic Psychology, 1945, pp. 129–37. That of street-boys in New York is in Peanuts! The Pickle Dealers, by Julius G. Rothenberg, American Speech, Oct., 1941, pp. 187–91.