What with everyone reading the old comics and myself listening to the Thin Man while I drive I realized that we are seeing and hearing a lot of stuff that no one ever hears anymore. In the Thin Man people go to 'Speaks' and if someone is drunk they are called 'tight'. As the Captain reads the Avengers I wonder how long it will be before he reads Rick saying 'Dig it'?

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  • ...A radio Thin Man series ? Set in the 20s ?

      IIRC , the movie that made it known was post-Prohibition...........

  • A few weeks ago I was at the library looking at newspapers on microfilm, researching the Vancouver riot in 1938 called "Bloody Sunday" (not to be confused with that other Bloody Sunday). The sitdown strikers--men on relief, who rioted after being driven out of the post office they were occupying by RCMP and city police--were often referred to in the papers as "tin canners."

    I tried to ask my parents about this. My mother didn't come to Vancouver until after the war, but my father arrived by hopping a freight train in 1939--neither could give me a straight answer. They got side-tracked, talking about my mother's job in the cannery--and I could never get them back to the question of what a tin canner was.

    My guess is these were men who begged for money with tin cans. But this seems to have been an organized thing and not just your usual pan handling.

  • I tried a Google search and found a reference in The Great Depression: 1929-1939 by Pierre Berton at Google books: "There was also a food committee, a publicity committee, a "bumming" committee to organise the "tin canners" who solicited funds on street corners, and a card committee that made sure each man carried a strike card..."

  • Thanks for that. I always use bing, never got anywhere with it. Guess I shoulda tried google. Figures that Pierre Berton would have something to say about it. I'll have to look into his book on the subject. One thing that strikes me strange is that these men on relief were called strikers. Nowadays we think of strikers as people who have jobs who go on strike for better conditions--but these guys were striking for the right to have a job.

  • The original detective novel by Dashiel Hammet. The movies were great but the book is proving just as good. Not as fast paced, but still good.



    Emerkeith Davyjack said:

    ...A radio Thin Man series ? Set in the 20s ?

      IIRC , the movie that made it known was post-Prohibition...........

  • I was thinking the other day that every generation has its own lingo, and usually a specific term for "good" and "bad."

    Some last a long time, like "cool" for good, which goes back at least to the 1950s, but some, like "rad" (or radical) for good, came and went in a single generation. "Sucks" for bad had a hard time catching on in my town because parents were very alarmed at the sexual connotation. But as my generation moved into adulthood, "sucks" became commonplace and has stuck with us ever since.

    In addition to rad, other words for good and you don't hear any more (except ironically) are "hip," "hep," "gnarly," "groovy," "outta site," "bee's knees" and "cat's pyjamas." "Awesome" seems to have really caught on, but I'm thinking "schway" and "primo" are on the way out, if they're not already gone (outside of stoner culture).

    You guys can probably think of 100 more.

  • I was going to comment on this on the Thor thread, but this is probably better. Stan Lee would always refer to women as "females" in his stories. At times the descriptive term could be said by any of his characters, regardless of sex. Is this a 1940s thing or was it never used outside a Marvel Silver Age story? I know I've never heard it come out of an actual human.

  • I just assumed female was used to avoid having to decide between "girl" or "woman." Those have differerent connotations for different people, which he was probably trying to avoid.



  • Captain Comics said:

    I was thinking the other day that every generation has its own lingo, and usually a specific term for "good" and "bad."

    Some last a long time, like "cool" for good, which goes back at least to the 1950s, but some, like "rad" (or radical) for good, came and went in a single generation. "Sucks" for bad had a hard time catching on in my town because parents were very alarmed at the sexual connotation. But as my generation moved into adulthood, "sucks" became commonplace and has stuck with us ever since.

    In addition to rad, other words for good and you don't hear any more (except ironically) are "hip," "hep," "gnarly," "groovy," "outta site," "bee's knees" and "cat's pyjamas." "Awesome" seems to have really caught on, but I'm thinking "schway" and "primo" are on the way out, if they're not already gone (outside of stoner culture).

    You guys can probably think of 100 more.

  • I wrote a blog post about "old sayings" a while back on my site. Read it here ... http://soundadvicefortoday.com/2006/12/29/what-a-maroon-send-him-to...

    I get weird looks from time to time when I pull out one of those old timey phrases, most of which I know from watching Looney Tunes and classic movies and TV.

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