The Vintage Reader

Who really wrote it?

You might have heard that there's some controversy over whether Clement C. Moore really wrote "A Visit from St. Nicholas" (a.k.a. "'Twas the Night Before Christmas"). Well, two scholars say he didn't, and agree that the more likely author was Henry Livingston.

More slang

Caught Holiday Inn on ReplayTV last night, and we're watching it now. The unedited version, even: the one with the "Abraham" blackface number. I've only seen the edited verson once. It's certainly more comfortable to watch than the unedited version, but it does take out a fairly important plot point.

But that's not what I was going to write about. Here's a bit of slang from Der Bingle (or from whomever wrote the script): beaned up. As in "Get a load of the idea I just beaned up!" I like it. Can't imagine how I can work it into normal conversation, though.

Costumes in this movie are by Edith Head, who seems to have been a little off her game. Production apparently started a few months before D-Day, so rationing doesn't explain the strange lack of fabric in the ladies' dance togs. Although I have always loved Linda's Valentine's Day costume.

Oh, and hey: Merry Christmas. :-)

Lift and slide

Hey, if you're looking for vintage doors that lift and slide, try the search term "pocket door." :-)

Jane Aiken Hodge

I've spent the weekend reading one of those entertaining woman-in-peril suspense novels from the early 70s by a writer I hadn't actually discovered before, so went looking for information on her and found this delightful interview. She's 85 and has a new book out.

Have a crafty Christmas

Haven't decorated the mantel for Christmas yet, but don't want to brave the Saturday-before-Christmas traffic just to go get some merry home-dec gewgaws? Never fear. As long as you have some aluminum foil and a couple of doilies, you're all set. Here, from Alcoa's Book of Decorations, copyright 1959, are some ideas.

Now, this book has some history itself. My grandmother, who was somewhat famous in her circle for crafts she made from styrofoam balls, tulle, felt, and plastic rolly eyes, had this book when I was little and I was completely fascinated by it. It has crafts for every holiday (those will surface here as the year progresses), and they're all made from aluminum foil.

Well, as time went on, I completely forgot about the Alcoa book, and went on about my life without missing it. And then... last year at the infamous AAUW book sale, what to my wondering eyes should appear but THIS:



Of course I had to have it. And in the spirit of giving, I'm going to share some of its secrets with you, the four or five people who actually read Vintage Reader (even though most of you seem to be looking for liver sausage recipes, for some reason). But on with the crafts.

Choirboys Carolers were big Christmas decorations in the 50s. My mother has some made out of industrial-strength cardboard with heads on springs so they bobble. They're coated in some sort of glittery shellac that I swear was originally intended for spacecraft. In any event, they have stood the test of time. Not so with the Alcoa choirboys. I doubt that these things lasted more than a week or two. In my house, they would be history as soon as we realized that we'd used all the foil that was meant to seal in the turkey succulence to make Christmas decorations.
Starburst mobile Plastic drinking straws! What can't you do with plastic drinking straws! A friend and I once used them to stabilize a hard drive so it wouldn't wobble around when it spun. But this is a far cleverer use for them: wrap them in foil, stick them in a styrofoam ball, and hang the whole darn thing from the ceiling. And don't forget the artificial flowers.
Santa Claus What a charming old elf this fellow is! I particularly like his whimsically clownish shoes and the lovely presents (also wrapped in Alcoa, I'd wager) he's sort of gesturing at.

Missing Retro

If, like me, you miss the Retro Postcard Depot, try these eCards from Dover Books. It's not the same as those wonderful fortune-telling cards that said things like "You will soon have an increase in salary and will buy an automobile!" but it's good.

Fiction and politics

A previously unpublished novel by Robert Heinlein sounds like it could be one of those first novels by a great writer that shows why first novels shouldn't be resurrected (sort of like this one--which I've actually read). Nevertheless, Heinlein fans should get a thrill.

Proofreading the past

In the mood for a little proofreading? Project Gutenberg's Distributed Proofreaders is a project that lets you help proof the pages that go into Project Gutenberg. A nifty proofing interface and interesting boards make it a fun way to spend your spare time.

Five by five

If you're a Buffy fan, you've heard the expression "five by five" and might have wondered where it came from. I remembered hearing that it was WWII slang, so I looked it up in my new favorite toy, the Dictionary of American Slang.

five-by-five adj. Fat. c1940: "Mr. Five-by-Five," title of a pop. song containing the line "He's five feet tall and five feet wide." 1956: "Anybody fat is five-by-five." S. Longstreet, The Real Jazz Old and New, 150.

I don't understand how it fits into the context in which it's used in the Buffyverse, but there you go.

Digital preservation

Wow. Cornell University Library NYS Historical Literature

The TBR list

Do you have a "To Be Read" (TBR) list? I do. And this is going on it: Amazon.com: Books: Me and Orson Welles

A master, rediscovered

We'll forgive Wired for their juvenile title pun due to the quality of this article about Philip K. Dick, a science fiction great who had some of the best ideas in speculative fiction.

Need I say more?

Readerville. The social life of the mind.

Who was that?

Until at least the mid-1970s, there were still some libraries that insisted on cataloging authors under their real names, with cross references under their pseudonyms. [There were reasons for this, so don't roll your eyes.]

If you grew up with this system, you can probably reel off real names of popular authors and amaze your younger friends while playing trivia games in bars. However, if you can't do that, here's a comprehensive list of pseudonyms (click on Pseudonyms with the range of letters you're after) to help you out.

It's in the book

Well, whadya know. Last week I made a comment on a forum about how people in St. Louis call certain other people "hoosiers" and it seems to have nothing to do with being from Indiana, and some snarky St. Louisan gave me what-for (something about how there was an influx of people from Indiana at some point, and they liked to plant geraniums in tractor tires in their front yards or some such nonsense). But I suspect that the snarky St. Louisan was wrong about the Indiana Immigration; according to the Dictionary of American Slang:

hoosier n. 1 An incompetent or inexperienced worker; an unworldly person, a rustic, hick or rube; a fool, a dupe. Logger, carnival, circus, and hobo use c1925; archaic. "Hoosier" == a citizen or resident of Indiana is the only nondisparaging use of this word. 2 A new convict or prison guard; a prison visitor. Prison use c1930.

And the related term:

hoosier up 1 To shirk; to malinger; to plot a slowdown of work. 1926: "When a crew of workmen purposely hoosier up on the company, it means... a 'conscious withdrawal of efficiency.'" S.H. Holbrook, Amer. Mercury, Jan., 64.

So there you have it.

The weirdness of searching

First, there's the Miserable Failure phenomenon, whereby a bunch of bloggers with a thorough understanding of GoogleJuice managed to voice their opinions through searches on Google. That went on all day today.

And now, as I'm looking for something to wear to an office party at a country club, I enter "country club" "saturday night" "what to wear" and I come up with this:

Edison High School Class of 1963 - Looking Back

The people who graduated from my alma mater 21 years before I did have put together a very nice site full of annoying music and charming pictures of high school life in the early 60s. Look through the slideshow. Enjoy all these cute kids with their stiff hair and dorky socks. I think they're wonderful. I wish I'd been in their class, back when the school would have been "the new school" (I think it was built in 1957, although honestly, it's been a long time since I celebrated Edison Week so I really don't remember) and the teachers were still fresh and young and idealistic... I have this image of all teachers in the 60s being kind of like the one in Up the Down Staircase, all "Hi Pupe!" and full of hope. I'm sure that wasn't really the case, but I'm betting that at least one of the embittered ready-to-retire veterans who filled my head with Latin or algebra or U.S. history was once a hip young teacher with an ear for the young (where does that come from, anyway? Doonesbury, I think... wasn't there once a Hip Young Priest with an Ear for the Young who had a coffeeshop? Back in the days when Mike--another Tulsa native, BTW--used to shed hayseeds when he walked around campus).

Oh yeah, I'm in stream of consciousness mode tonight. Kudos on the web site, Class of '63. Hope your 40th was good. Hope my 20th is. I don't know if I'll be there; it's a three-day drive from here. Seems like a long way to go to stand around chatting with people I haven't seen in 20 years while "99 Red Balloons" blares overhead.

On the reunion site at Classmates.com someone wants to know if anyone has a copy of our "senior jam." My inclination is to ask what the hell a senior jam is, so I'm guessing I don't have a copy of it. It sounds very 80s, doesn't it? Senior jam. My husband thinks it's a video. I thought it might be some kind of slam book or something. If it's a video, I hope it wasn't that assembly where they showed slides of all the socs (if you ever read S.E. Hinton you've seen that word. Just in case you couldn't figure it out--and who could, really, from the spelling--it's pronounced so-shez. The socs at Edison in the 80s were very mild, by soc standards. They didn't drive around in Mustangs; they drove BMWs or Volkswagen Rabbit convertibles or Jeeps or their parents' cars. They weren't mean, like the Memorial socs. The ones I knew were mostly very nice, smart, well-mannered kids. But there was still a social gap. Which is why I don't know what to wear to a country club on a Saturday night for an office party. And there we are back at the beginning.) at parties none of the rest of us went to and made up stuff about who dated whom each year.

Oh well, this maudlin reminiscing has gone on too long now, and I'm really kind of curious about that S.E. Hinton site, so I'm going to surf away now.

Random creepy definition

More from the Dictionary of American Slang, 1967 edition:

"Target A The Pentagon Building in Washington, D.C. Jocular use. In ref. to an atomic attack against the U.S. in any future war."

The what was what-what?

Here's the first paragraph of Brain Guy, the Benjamin Appel book I won on eBay a few months back. The slang is so thick I can hardly get through it, but here's my interlinear translation. This seems like the kind of thing William Denton would be good for, but unfortunately, there's one word he doesn't list. See if you can figure out what it is.

"Who could he shake down for some dough?"
Whom could he persuade to loan him a dollar or two?
"In the Italian table d'hote he cracked the last walnuts with a spiteful feeling that the meal had cleaned him out, but who gave a damn?"
At the Italian restaurant, with its limited but inexpensive prix fixe meals, he tossed the last of his change down [that's a guess] with a spiteful feeling that the meal had cost him all the money he had with him, but who cared?
"Eighty-five cents plus fifteen cent tip."
The meal cost eighty-five cents, plus a gratuity of fifteen cents, or just under fifteen percent.
"That skunked a buck."
That was a whole dollar.
"Hell, he needed money."
He was badly in need of money.
"It'd been a jinx all day."
His luck had not been good all day.
"None of his horses'd come in."
He had not won any bets at the racetrack.
"The numbers'd been n.g."
The numbers had been n.g.
"And payday was a mile off."
And payday was not forthcoming.

...if you guessed that n.g. was the word Denton didn't cover, you'd be right. And you'll be hitting your head with your palm in a minute, like I just did when I looked it up in the Dictionary of American Slang and found out that it means "No good, worthless; untrustworty, unethical, contemptible. From the initials for 'no good.'"

Liver a little

Odd. Next to my name (which appears somewhere on this site), the most common search term that brings people here is "liver sausage." Hope you're all enjoying that Liver Sausage with Creole Sauce recipe. It's full of livery goodness!

There's no place like home

From Charm: the Career Girl's Guide to Business and Personal Success, by Whitcomb and Lang:

"If you're lucky enough to get into one of the residences run for business girls, you'll have the fun of college dorm living at quite low expenses. ... You are surrounded by girls who have the same interests and problems. Usually a happy community life prevails, with the girls finding dates for one another, swapping hats and jewelry, and pitching in when someone has a big job to finish. There's always someone who's good at setting hair or altering dresses and always someone who has plans for fun that can include you."

[Oh, sure, it's all fun and games until your landlady tries to sell you into slavery. Shu-sho, shu-sho!]

Ahem.

So where are these places now? It kind of sounds like fun, and definitely like something that could come in handy in a place like New York or Silicon Valley.