American Language Supplement 2 (155 page)

5
Many of its terms are listed in Stage Terms, by Percy W. White,
American Speech
, May, 1926, pp. 436–37, and in Vol. III (Theatrical Workers’ Slang and Jargon) of the Federal Writers’ Project Lexicon of Trade Jargon. The word
vaudeville
was borrowed from the French. The DAE shows that it began to come into use in the United States in the Civil War era. The English prefer
variety
, though it is possible that the latter may be an Americanism. The NED’s first example of its use is dated 1886, but the DAE traces it in the United States to 1882, and in the form of
varieties
to 1849.

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
W
estern
A
ssociated
M
otion
P
icture
A
dvertisers, 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.