A reader wrote me:
My friend came across the following song while doing some background research for his dissertation, and there’s a word that escapes us in the lyrics: in https://youtu.be/qm8vgld7QOs it’s audible around 0:36 (“less than sixty percent go for a ???”) My suspicion is that it’s a contemporary-to-Ms.-Raye term I’m simply not familiar with, but perhaps you or others in the Hattery know the word?
(We’re also left uncertain about the force of being from the sticks here – a whiff of provinciality about the straight-and-narrow? – but that is beyond the scope, I think, of the Hattery.)
The mysterious word was evident to me as soon as I lent an ear, but since it escaped even the geniuses at Genius.com (“Now I find that less than sixty percent go for a [?]”) and it’s probably unknown to most denizens of the twenty-first century who didn’t fritter away their youth on pulp fiction of the mid-twentieth, I figure it’s worth a post. Ms. Raye is complaining that men don’t go for a frail, which is, to quote Green’s Dictionary of Slang, “(orig. US, also phrail) a girl, a woman.” I hadn’t seen the “phrail” version (which only shows up in the 1929 citation); I had also not been aware that it derives from an earlier sense ‘a prostitute, a mistress,’ which goes back to the eighteenth century. The citations for the more recent/general sense start in 1900 ([US] A.H. Lewis ‘Mulberry Mary’ in Sandburrs 11: She d’ soonest frail that ever walks in d’ Bend) and are most common in the period 1920-60; they’re all pretty lively, and I recommend visiting the link.
I’m disappointed in the OED (entry revised 2023), which lumps both senses together:
2. Chiefly U.S. Usually disparaging. A sexually promiscuous woman; (also) a prostitute; a mistress. Later also: a girl or woman, esp. considered sexually. Now chiefly historical and likely to be regarded as offensive.
In early use often in fair frail.
1782 Scorning to enter the dwelling of her seducer, he traced her to the opera… Early on Sunday morning he put the fair frail into a chaise, and set off for their native town.
Pennsylvania Packet 23 May1790 From his general acquaintance with the fair frail—people began to consider him as—a buck.
Pennsylvania Packet 7 April
[…]1908 Aw, the frails is all the same… A guy comes along and shoots that old con about how he’s the grandest thing on earth, an’ the wisest of ’em fall.
H. Green, Maison de Shine 501924 Those frails down at the Falls that earn their leeving every night with a deeferent lumberjack—those women are better than you.
E. Robinson in Cosmopolitan June 166/3
[…]
As for “the sticks,” it goes without saying that nothing is beyond the scope of the Hattery.
Minnie the Moocher was the roughest, toughest frail.
https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/cabcalloway/minniethemoocher.html
She had a dream about the king of Sweden
He gave her things, that she was needin’.
All together now!
Hi de hi de hi de hi!
But she doesn’t complain that “less than 60% go for a frail”. It’s “go for us frails”.
The genius.com transcription gets some other lines wrong: I hear “mother’s sharp hat needles”, “disillusioned as can be”, “female of the species”.
Regarding the ex’s history, page 240 of “Sexual Behavior in the Human Male” contains a statistic on masturbation frequencies of “Single Males” by age. But this is a 1949 edition. If the song is from Jan/Feb 1949 it probably refers to the 1948 first edition. The sequel about the Female that she warns about was published in 1953.
The headline “Sticks Nix Hick Pix” might have better read “Hicks Nix Sticks Pix” — being plurale tantum, ‘sticks’ can preserve its plural -s when used attributively.
But she doesn’t complain that “less than 60% go for a frail”. It’s “go for us frails”.
Good point.
Many thanks to the Hat for the post! I’ll forward this to my friend anon – I should clarify that the sticks ~ somewhere beyond even will-it-play-in-Peoria was clear to me as the base sense, I’m just bad at seeing how it applies here – why are her partner’s ‘fancy tricks’ attributable to this background?
Mimsy, thanks. That helped resolve a lingering doubt.
I don’t think “the sticks” is about being “straight and narrow”, just narrow. He did have tricks, and she thought they were impressive, but now she realizes how much more he had to learn.
In other words, if you’re from the sticks you’re unlikely to know fancy tricks (unlike those fancy city slickers).
There are sources other than pulp fiction from which the word might have been learned, as David Eddyshaw indicates.
They heard the breeze
In the trees
Singing weird melodies
And they made that the start of the blues.
And from a jail came the wail
Of a down-hearted frail
And they played that
As part of the blues.
“Birth of the Blues”, lyric by Buddy DeSylva and Lew Brown, music by Ray Henderson, 1926.
True, of course, but when I was a youth I read pulp fiction rather than listening to the blues.
I had thought frail appeared in Confederacy of Dunces, but I was wrong. I think I was confusing it with jade.
However, GB indicates 12 occurrences in the collected works of Raymond Chandler. None in Hammett.
An interesting comparison!
There’s no way to make it work, but I want this sense of frail to be a borrowing from “a Scand. source akin to” ON friðla f. “lover, mistress; (later) harlot, prostitute”.
Did it have a descendant in Swedish? Since the first two citations in the OED are from a Philadelphia newspaper, you could speculate that “frail” was a Hobson-Jobson of a word used by the Swedish speakers in the region. Wikipedia informs me that at Trinity Church in Swedesboro, New Jersey, about 15 miles away, services were held in Swedish till 1786.
Swedish frilla ‘(archaic) concubine, mistress.’
Yes, frilla, still pretty current through the 17th C. SAOB’s latest non-archaizing example, from 1730, is from a Finland Swedish source. That might be interesting, since I believe many of the settlers in New Sweden came from Finland.
But this is a very thin thread of evidence.
Oh, were you looking for rigor?
This sense of “frail” clearly has a lot to do with the sense “morally weak” (c. 1390 in the OED) and of a woman, “promiscuous” (1752). Also, “the frail sex” goes back to the 17th century at least. But I can’t think of an adjective with a similar meaning that made the transition to a noun—there’s no “lovely loose” corresponding to “fair frail”, AFAIK—so the speculation that Swedish frilla might be involved doesn’t seem unreasonable. Too bad there’s no evidence for it.
Rigor is for mortis.
Yes, the frailty of the adjective derivation is why I thought of friðla too. For another pathway, I think the Da. form already in Danelaw times could have been frillæ, which would have yielded Mod. Eng. **frill. I guess this could have been folk-etymologized as frail at some point. If it was regional and sociolectal, it could also have slid unrecorded through a few centuries of English until it turned up in the port city of Philadelphia in the late 19th C.
But I can’t think of an adjective with a similar meaning that made the transition to a noun
There is broad, which according to Green, is much more recent than I had thought.
Ah, broad is a good one.
But now I’m getting confused. Google Books has the 1790 sentence in the same year in an English magazine, and the setting of the story is clearly England (our “buck” had gone to London and “one of the Inns of Court”). Also “the fair frail” there seems to be short for “the fair frail sex” in general. I don’t see the 1782 citation at GB. But maybe there’s no Philly connection. And maybe more later.
The OED’s 1790 cite from the Pennsylvania Packet is taken from a story that was also published in the same year in The New Lady’s Magazine (London), Walker’s Hibernian Magazine, (Dublin), and The British Mercury (Hamburg!). (see these results). The protagonist of the story is said to have been ‘sent to London’ in such a summary way that it seems he was already in England. Offhand, it doesn’t seem that this story necessarily originated in the United States.
Green’s first cites for sense 1 (‘prostitute’) are also from British sources.
1782 ” Scorning to enter the dwelling of her seducer, he traced her to the opera…”
A nice juicy dangler.
So the decline and fall of the English language didn’t start with my children’s generation….
The collocation fair frail in this usage has the feel of a literary reference. Google Books turns up many other instances like this one from March 1785, p. 153, from George Crabbe (‘Should some fair frail-one drive her prancing pair…’). For non-satirical use, from a translation of Cervantes’ Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda (1741, p. 123 here) or even earlier, John Fletcher et al., Love’s Cure, or The Martial Maid, act 3, scene 3 (here). But I have the feeling these are nowhere near pinning it down.
I hope other LH readers follow up on early attestions of fair frail and frail fair. It seems like one could get to the bottom of this matter. (I can hear Johnson saying, ‘I say the woman was fundamentally sensible.’) I won’t do anything further because I am on the road and was working off my tablet. Good luck!
somewhat following Xerîb, i wonder whether an alternation of “fair sex” and “frail sex” would’ve made “fair frail” an obvious collocation without needing a single primary literary reference point?
google ngrams seems to have become as incoherent as everything else in that burning house, but i think the “English (2009)” corpus shows “the fair sex” arriving with a bang around 1800, and “the frail sex” rising sharply (at a much lower level) around 1900. “fair frail” has its heyday between the 1760s and 1850s, and then bubbles along less prominently til a more complete decline in the 1930s; “frail fair” has a peak aound 1740, and then vanishes, to reemerge from the 1780s to 1820s, after which it slowly fades out.
that burning house
Is there an antonym for that phrase, to describe the Hattery? ‘Shining house’?
Good grief I go to bed having caught up with the comments, only to wake to a whole topic raised and despatched back to 1740.
So the decline and fall of the English language didn’t start with my children’s generation….
Indeed not. As of last night (my time, another thread Bill and Bull) we traced it to the encouragement of fornication by the Kirk courts.
@Jerry Friedman: Not just Swedish, but all over Scandinavia. Used for the mistresses of kings and noblemen, at least a millenium ago. My Danish dictionary sources are down at the moment, but Wikipedia has articles in all of the mainland Scandinavian languages (plus Portuguese, for whatever reason).
So the decline and fall of the English language didn’t start with my children’s generation….
There is an actual genre of Ancient Egyptian called the “Pessimistic Literature”, describing how the young no longer respect their elders, government is falling apart, immorality is rampant etc etc.
Gardiner is rather sniffy about this, characterising it as the perennial moaning of conservatives throughout the ages, but it seems to me that these writers were quite right. Things really have been going downhill over these past four thousand years. Nobody can even build a decent pyramid any more.
Nobody can even build a decent pyramid any more.
We do it in a more sophisticated way now. If you send me $100, I’ll explain how you can use your connections and people skills to make a lot of money.
@Lars Skovlund: Thanks. The only reason I focused on Swedish was that I mistakenly thought the earliest OED citations reflected use in Philadelphia, and there were Swedish speakers nearby at about the right time.
@AntC:
this blog of majesty, this seat of ours,
this other eden, demi-paradise,
this fortress built from language by ourselves
against infection and the hand of war,
this feed happy of mien, this little world,
this precious stone set in the silver sea
which serves it in the office of firewall
for what we hote by keyboard or by mouse,
against the envy of less happier blogs,
this blessed plot, this berth, this realm, this Hattery!
“Frailty, thy name is Fräulein.”
I wonder if the “prostitute” meaning of “frail” is really derived from the adjective, or from a dialect word meaning “container,” cf. “fishfrail,” which I learned from Dylan Thomas?
@rozele: Bravo!
@Rodger C.: I wondered about that too, but I couldn’t think of parallels – or none that didn’t take the path through “vagina”.
@mimsy
I managed to avoid reading the headline but not the “go for a ?” before I listened and due to that priming I momentarily heard “go for a sphrails” before course correcting to “go for us phrails/frails”.