Sherlock Holmes Great War Parodies and Pastiches II

by Bill Peschel

  [Back] Upper crust: The topmost layer of society. The phrase had been in use since the early 19th century and is derived from bread baking. A perfectly baked loaf has the upper crust finely shaped, while the lower crust would be overbaked from contact with the oven’s hot floor and presumably has grit and other nasty things embedded in it.

  [Back] King Edward: Edward VII (1841-1910), better known as “Bertie,” was Queen Victoria’s son. Despite his reputation as a pampered playboy, he proved to be a surprisingly competent ruler during his nine-year reign.

  [Back] Dukes: In the English peerage, duke is the highest rank, followed by marquess, earl, viscount, and baron/baroness. As an aside, knighthood is a title bestowed on a person and is not an inheritable rank.

  [Back] King George: George V (1865-1936) was Edward’s son, Victoria’s grandson, and the father of the future Edward VIII—who abdicated to marry Wallace Simpson—and George VI (Queen Elizabeth’s father).

  [Back] Alfred Austin’s poems: English poet (1835-1913) who followed Tennyson as Poet Laureate after William Morris declined the honor and Algernon Swinburne was considered too radical for the post. His status among poets can be judged by their nickname for him: “Banjo Byron.”

  [Back] Morris chair: An early design of a reclining chair, produced by artist and craftsman William Morris (1836-1896) and introduced about 1866. It featured a back that could be adjusted with movable pegs, high armrests, and spindles on the sides, giving it an airy look.

  [Back] All your buttons: To not have much intelligence.

  [Back] Pittsburgh millionaire: A pejorative phrase describing men of impoverished or working-class backgrounds who became wealthy industrialists. During the turn of the last century, Pittsburgh was an boom town on a par with Silicon Valley in the 1990s. Steel, iron, coal, oil, lumber, railroads, electrical, banking: The growth of these industries made millionaires out of the business owners and investors, including Andrew Carnegie, Henry Frick, George Westinghouse, Thomas Mellon, and Charles Schwab. Their taste in decoration and art was a source of amusement to intellectuals, and concerns about their unregulated exploitation of the workers contributed to the burgeoning union movement.

  [Back] Made no noise: A reference to the famous conversation in “Silver Blaze”:

  Gregory (Scotland Yard detective): “Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?”

  Holmes: “To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.”

  Gregory: “The dog did nothing in the night-time.”

  Holmes: “That was the curious incident.”

  [Back] Mazuma: Money, from the Hebrew word mazuma for prepared or ready.

  [Back] Shovel dust: An uncommon way of saying “shove off”—the phrase is not found in any slang dictionaries. It was created presumably to work the mud reference into the sentence.

  [Back] Old Nick Carter: Nick Carter was a fictional detective created in 1886 by publisher Ormond G. Smith (1860-1933) for Street & Smith. The character, written by many hands under the pseudonyms “Nick Carter” or “Sergeant Ryan,” grew so popular that Nick Carter Weekly was created to showcase him.

  [Back] Ich kebibble: A slang phrase meaning “I should worry!” and derived from a 1913 song by Sam Lewis (1885-1959) and George Meyer (1884-1959) called “Isch Gabibble (I Should Worry).” One theory says the phrase comes from the Yiddish, but it is more likely to be faux-Yiddish. “Bibble” as nonsense appears in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night: “Endeavour thy self to sleepe, and leave thy vain bibble babble.”

  [Back] Side-kicker: A partner. It first appeared in print around 1900. It is theorized that it came from thieves cant. A kick was the side pocket in the trousers and the hardest for a pickpocket to reach. So a sidekick became associated with an inseparable companion.

  [Back] Do you get me, Steve?: A catchphrase probably popularized in part by evangelist Billy Sunday (1862-1935), who would pepper his sermons with phrases such as “get me?” and “do you get me?”

  [Back] Income-tax: In 1909, Prime Minister Lloyd George (1863-1945) proposed that the income tax be changed to a progressive system. Income greater than £2,000 was taxed at a higher rate, and an additional “super tax” was charged on those with incomes greater than £5,000. Large landowners were also hit with a 20% tax when land changed hands. The House of Lords rejected the budget, the first time it had done so in two centuries. The political struggle continued into late 1910, and it took the king’s threat of flooding the House of Lords with hundreds of new Liberal peers before the Lords passed the budget (minus the land tax). This step helped break the financial power of the aristocracy and accelerated its decline.

  [Back] Demnition bow-wows: A very upper-crust method of saying “damned dogs.” Charles Dickens also has Mr. Mantalini say it in Nicholas Nickleby. It is so genteel a phrase that the Chicago Tribune used it in a column in 1883: “Just at the present moment the world appears from the newspapers to be going to the demnition bow-wows.”

  [Back] Billiard table: While billiards has been used as an umbrella term for pool games, this is English billiards they’re talking about. The game is played using two cue balls and a red object ball on a 12-foot-by-6-foot snooker table. Each player or team gets its own cue ball, and points are scored for cannons (striking the object ball after bouncing the cue off one or more rails) and pocketing balls. The pool table is the more commonly-known eight-ball game played on a table between 7 and 9 feet long.

  [Back] Cabbaged: To steal, derived from thieves cant for purloining material. The word originated among tailors who made clothing from material brought by the customer. Unscrupulous tailors would keep back (“cabbage”) unused cloth instead of giving it back to the buyer and sell it to someone else.

  [Back] Havanas: Cuba had a reputation for growing high-quality tobacco used in cigars. They were so popular that before he imposed a trade embargo on Cuba, President John F. Kennedy (1917-1963) instructed an aid to secure as many cigars as he could (he found 1,200 Petit Upmanns).

  [Back] Is the evil thereof: Spoken by Jesus in his Sermon on the Mount. It appears in Matthew 6:34, and implies that it is enough for man to live in the moment and seek the kingdom of God.

  [Back] Q.T.: On the quiet. The phrase has been traced back to a British farce My Husband’s Secret (1874) by Walter Devereux Whitty, and “on the quiet” to an 1847 sporting magazine. While the source is unknown, one theory has it that the letters stand for the Latin phrase quaedam tacenda for “things about which to keep quiet.” Students studying classical literature at Oxford would occasionally come across obscene or improper phrases, which the teacher would pass over by stating “here there are quaedam tacenda.” It is possible that students would note these passages as “QT,” inspiring the phrase “on the QT.”

  [Back] Gink: An odd guy or fellow. It originated in America, but could be a descendant of the Scottish ginkie, which was used to describe a frivolous woman.

  [Back] Carte blanche: A blank check. Figuratively, absolute power to use at one’s discretion.

  [Back] Balmoral Castle: A large estate house in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, and a private residence of the royal family since Prince Albert purchased it in 1852. It was a particular favorite of Queen Victoria.

  [Back] Scotch smoke: Picturesque slang for whiskey, inspired by the spirit’s smoky taste.

  [Back] Always sober: The drunken butler, with his required (and easy) access to the drinks cabinet, has been a comic staple since Shakespeare’s time (when he identified Stephano in The Tempest as “a drunken butler”). In Letters from Hell (1866), a didactic Christian novel by V. A. Thisted (1815-1877), the narrator described how easy it is “to set up an establishment, to live in style, as the phrase went on earth, he is straightway surrounded by faithless stewards, drunken butlers, thieving servants of all kinds.”

  [Back] Napoleon III: There are several types of imperials. The Napoleon III version consists of a handlebar moustache, with the ends pointed, and a long chin puff. It is named for Louis-Napoleon Bon
aparte (1808-1873), the nephew and heir of Napoleon. He was emperor (1852-1870) of the Second French Empire until the monarchy was abolished after he lost the Franco-Prussian War.

  [Back] Best chef: A great chef was worth his weight in gold. In his Wooster novels, P.G. Wodehouse (1881-1975) got plenty of comic mileage out of the travails of master French chef Anatole, “God’s gift to the gastric juices,” who was always threatening to quit Aunt Agatha’s service after one of Bertie’s plans goes pear-shaped.

  [Back] Comprenez vous cela: “How do you see it?”

  [Back] Northern Caucasia: This is the older name for the territory that is part of the Great Caucasus mountain range that runs between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea near Turkey and Armenia. Tikhorietzkaia is an older spelling of Tikhoretsk, a city near the Black Sea.

  [Back] King Alexander: This probably refers to King Alexander I (1876-1903), who reigned for four years before he was assassinated, along with his wife, by army officers as part of a coup. Members of this group, the Black Hand, would also be responsible for killing Archduke Franz Ferdinand (1863-1914), triggering World War I.

  [Back] Charlotte russe: A dessert invented by French chef Marie-Antoine Careme (1784-1833). It is named for Princess Charlotte, the only child of his former employer, George IV (1762-1830) and, by adding the French word for Russia, his then-employer Czar Alexander I (1777-1825). It is made by lining a mold with ladyfingers and filling it with Bavarian cream.

  [Back] Ballarat gold mines: Ballarat surfaces in “The Boscome Valley Mystery” when Holmes interprets Charles McCarthy’s dying message as saying his killer came from there. In The Sign of Four, Watson compares the heaps of earth dug up at Pondicherry Lodge to the Ballarat diggings. Ballarat was a sheep station that exploded into a city when gold was discovered there in 1851. It is in the state of Victoria, about 65 miles from Melbourne.

  [Back] Kneipp cure: A treatment devised by Sebastian Kneipp (1821-1897) using water in various ways, such as walking barefoot in the snow, to treat sicknesses and promote good health.

  [Back] Bellwether: A flock of sheep will obligingly follow a castrated ram (wether in Middle English) wearing a bell around its neck. Bellwether is also applied to someone who leads or a trend people are following.

  [Back] Finger-bowls: A bowl of water, sometimes garnished with a lemon slice, used to clean the fingers. It is served on a plate with a doily alongside a dessert fork and spoon after the dinner plates have been cleared but before dessert is served. The diner moves the fork and spoon off the plate, then dips each hand and wipes them, one at a time, on the napkin in the lap. The diner shouldn’t wipe their hands over the table, wash their lips, or touch or eat the lemon. The diner then moves the bowl and doily to the top left corner of the place setting, leaving the plate bare for the dessert serving.

  [Back] Old Vic is dead: Queen Victoria’s been gone for quite some time. She died in 1901, 17 years before this story was published.

  [Back] Marathon: A reference to the messenger Pheidippides, who in 490 B.C. ran 26 miles from the Battle of Marathon to Athens to report the Greek victory over the Persians before dying. His feat, popularized in the 1879 poem by Robert Browning (1812-1889), inspired Olympic organizers to hold the first marathon at the 1898 games in Athens. Little did he know his name would be used for a chain of shoe stores (Phidippides) and he would inspire runners to imitate him, and sometimes share his fate.

  [Back] All to the mustard: A phrase originating about 1903 meaning to be perfect in every way. P.G. Wodehouse (1881-1975) uses the phrase in The Inimitable Jeeves (1923): “[The book] was open at page two hundred and fifteen, and a passage heavily marked in pencil caught my eye. And directly I read it I saw that it was all to the mustard and was going to help me in my business.”

  [Back] Great horn spoon: A popular oath during the 19th century, but of unknown origin. Its earliest appearance is in a patriotic song from the 1840s called “French Claim” about a French king who refuses to pay America 25 million francs—the cause is not stated—and the nation’s reaction:

  The more he thought on’t it the madder he grew,

  Until he vowed by the great horn spoon,

  Unless they did the thing that was right,

  He’d give them a licking, and that pretty soon.

  [Back] Comprends-tu cela, tu imbecile: “Do you understand that, you fool?”

  [Back] Killing a cat: A variation on “there’s more than one way to skin a cat.” There are plenty of alternative proverbs, as well as pets. The earliest comes from 1678, where a collection of English proverbs contains “there are more ways to kill a dog than hanging.”

  [Back] Uncle Dudley: A character in the Lady Bountiful comic strip, drawn by Gene Carr (1881-1959). This full-page strip is considered the earliest to feature a female lead, who was a wealthy young woman who reacts to the comic mishaps of her Uncle Dudley. It debuted in 1902 in William Randolph Hearst’s newspapers, but the next year Carr was hired by Joseph Pulitzer, and Lady Bountiful appeared in the New York World. The strip was dropped in 1905 but revived twice (1915-1919 and 1926-1929).

  [Back] Andaman Islands: An archipelago in the Bay of Bengal between India and Myanmar.

  [Back] Prosit: A German word, derived from the Latin, meaning “may it benefit (you).”

  [Back] Half-Nelson grip: A wrestling hold in which an arm encircles an opponent under the armpit and anchors the hand behind the opponent’s neck. The origin of the name is unknown; references to it can be found as far back as the early 19th century. Since Teresa and Tooter were not really wrestling, at least in the professional sense, they probably just had an arm around each other’s neck.

  [Back] Pampango cigar: Tobacco from the Pampanga province in the Philippines. The crop was introduced by the Spanish in the 1780s, and a century later, the demand was so great that it became the major cash crop in the region, with families setting up cottage shops making cigarettes and cigars.

  [Back] In a minstrel show: During a typical minstrel show, the musicians and dancers formed a semicircle around the interlocutor. At one end sat Mr. Tambo with his tambourine and at the other Mr. Bones with a pair of clappers. The interlocutor would stand in the middle. He acted as the master of ceremonies and trade jokes with the performers, particularly the end men, in between the musical numbers, ballads, comic songs, and other acts.

  [Back] Parthian shot: The Parthians were an ancient Iranian tribe whose mounted warriors were trained to fire arrows behind them while riding. While a parting shot and a Parthian shot mean the same thing, the two phrases were derived at different times, and their phonetic similarity is a coincidence. Holmes launches a Parthian shot early in A Study in Scarlet when he reminds Inspector Lestrade that the Rache scrawled on the wall in blood is German for “revenge” and not short for “Rachel.”

  [Back] Xavier de Montepin: A popular French novelist (1823-1902) who specialized in plays and serialized novels, sometimes writing three of them in a year.

  [Back] Torn down at once: A coal-burning railroad engine threw off sparks and hot cinders that could set a building on fire. This could cause a disaster to towns where most of the structures were made of wood.

  [Back] Seven, come eleven: In the dice game of craps, the table has a Pass line and a Don’t Pass line where bets on the first roll can be placed. The first roll is called the “come-out” roll. A 7 or 11 is a win for anyone who bet on the Pass line. (A 2, 3, or 12 means the Pass bettors lose. Any other number sets the Point, which has to be rolled again before a 7). Earlier versions of the phrase are “Come seven, come eleven,” but the true origins and meaning are unknown.

  [Back] Lucullan, not to say Apician: Lucius Lucullus (118-57/56 B.C.) was a politician and general who spent much of the booty from his wildly successful campaigns on buildings, arts, sciences, and other projects on a scale that impressed even his fellow Romans. His love of fine dining was so renowned that lucullan means gourmet and luxurious. Marcus Apicius was a Roman gourmet in the 1st century A.D. It is believed but not
proved that he wrote a cookbook called Apicius, so his name has been associated with those with an excessive love of fine food.

  [Back] Taffy: Slang for flattery. In Mark Twain’s essay “Rules for Funeral Etiquette,” he advises the attendee to “listen, with as intense an expression of attention as you can command, to the official statement of the character and history of the person in whose honor the entertainment is given; and if these statistics should seem to fail to tally with the facts, in places, do not nudge your neighbor, or press your foot upon his toes, or manifest, by any other sign, your awareness that taffy is being distributed.”

  [Back] W.C.T.U.: Women’s Christian Temperance Union, the first women’s organization dedicated to social reform. Founded in 1873 with the mission to create “a sober and pure world,” it was one of the drivers behind Prohibition.

  [Back] London Punch: The humor magazine that skewered British society for more than 160 years.

  [Back] Used to say: Author unknown. It has been attributed to Ben Franklin and George Eliot wrote a variation on that sentiment. Its earliest appearance is in an autograph album signed by botanist Jacob Bobart (1641-1719). The second line actually reads “Views from thy hand no worthy action done.”