Terms Which Have Disappeared

10 common sayings which nowadays, I mostly hear on TCM movies.

By and large, having read the riot act, & shedding crocodile tears for the white elephant but will turn a blind eye
to diehard fanatics running amok & painting the town red by giving the third degree while resting on their laurels.

 

The Oakland Athletics baseball team still embraces the logo of the "white elephant," which stems from an insult thrown at their Philadelphia forebearers over a century ago. A rival manager dismissed the team as the "white elephants" of the league, and the Athletics defiantly adopted said pachyderm as their insignia. And it remains such to this day, even though most fans have no idea why.

 

I recall the phrase "I love my wife, but oh, you kid!" from reading it in comic books as a child. I believe it's an old song title.

 

Very interesting.

 

The song was unbelievably popular during the winter of '08-'09.

 

^^^ Spouses cheating on each other - nothing new, even then, but interesting that it was a popular song.

 

There was an awful lot of wink-wink nudge nudge during that era. Very much double-standard though -- you rarely heard a playful song about a wife having some fun on the side. At least not in public.

During the Era itself, "I love my wife but Oh You Kid!" was often used sarcastically/ironically, to refer to someone who was hopelessly out of touch with current popular culture -- the sort of character who would go around in a jazzbo tie and a raccoon coat in 1937 and think he was really in the groove.

 

When I was a teenager in the early '60s our elders thought we still said "daddy-o"" and "see you later, alligator."We thought it was almost painfully hilarious. Woody Allen got some mileage out of this sort of cluelessness in "Bananas"when the FBI director says of the supposed communist revolutionary (Allen), "Ï want to make an example of this ---- hepcat!"

 

Straight from the fridge, dad!

It's about the same as all those annoying middle-aged white guys in the '90s who went around saying "Yo, what it is?"

 

To "mill/work" something.

I mean, the washing-machine is "milling/working the wash". Or "the car-tyre is working too much, if you pump it up too less. Or working your fresh-made salad with your salad-cutlery.

I'm 31, but I don't believe, that the now 25's still knows this old-fashion word. From whom they should learn this old word?

 

Can anyone explain what it means to call someone a jelly bean or jelly roll? I believe it was an expression used in the south in the twenties to describe the male counterpart to a flapper. Does anyone know ?

 

Depending on the neighborhood you were in, it was either a strutting, conceited young man who considered his girlfriend a mere accessory to his own sartorial magnificence -- or a pimp. Or sometimes both.

 

One of my favorite 78 rpm records I played as a kid was Phil Harris singing "Jelly Bean".
"He's a drug store cutie, a sidewalk beauty, they call him 'Jelly Bean'."

 

So.. what's the difference (in 20's terms) between a "cake eater" and a "jelly bean?"

 

cake eater = ladies man.

jelly bean = boyfriend.

59 Quick Slang Phrases From The 1920s We Should Start ...

 

Changing:

-girl with flaxen hair = blondie

-attractive girl = yummy

and so on...

 

Funny timing, I'm reading a book about "The Greats Gatsby," and the author described a Jelly Bean as the male equivalent of a flapper and called Fitzgerald the first Jelly Bean. Can't find the exact page, but I read that within the last two days. But I have no doubt, as noted above, that it had a pretty pliable meaning that probably took on different shades of meaning over time - as slang often does.

 

"Jelly roll" is an old blues/jazz term for a woman's sex organs. Not the same thing!

http://www.apassion4jazz.net/etymology.html

 

A cake eater is an effette young man who sits languidly around a woman's parlor eating cake and admiring the crease in his trousers while all the real men are out wrestling bears or something. While it wasn't quite the same thing as calling a man a pansy or a nance, it did have a definite edge of dismissing the target as un-masculine.

 

So a cake eater is equivalent to a lounge lizard?