If you want to blow your wig, cast your pies on the Hepcats Jive Talk Dictionary (1945):
In the old days the people greeted a new ruler with the cry: “The King is dead, long live the King!” Today there’s a strange shout: “Webster is dead, long live the Hepster!” […]
The Editors feel that JIVE TALK is here to stay and believe that this book is the most complete dictionary of Jive words and phrases ever presented. It may be of no assistance to an Abercrombie but we’re sure it will help most people a great deal.
Zowie! And don’t miss the JEOGRAPHICAL JIVE section, which goes from KEEN from ABERDEEN to CONQUERS from YONKERS. Take a bow, Jay!
Delightful as the work may be, I noticed a number of examples of Cockney rhyming slang in there. This leads me to doubt whether the dictionary is altogether authentic.* Daddy-O.
I notice “ofay” in the intro, used apparently without understanding of its slurfulness. None of the speculations about its origin that I’ve seen look at all plausible.
* On the other hand, talking of “authenticity” in this context is frankly Squaresville.
Ah. Cab Calloway (may his name be honoured) for the real thing (or at least, more real):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jive_talk
I did wonder about “ofay” as possible backslang. Looks a lot more plausible, at least, than guesswork based on accidental resemblances with Yoruba.
Well, somebody has to link this:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fXSLcYQHqFQ&pp=0gcJCTMBo7VqN5tD
It’s not hard to find seemingly non-slurful uses of “ofay” from that time period, although it is possible that these uses were the result of would-be hepcats using the term while blissfully unaware of some accompanying tonal baggage that would have been noticed by at least some contemporaneous readers/hearers. Consider this from a music-trade-press story in the June 23, 1945 issue of still-arthrous _The Billboard_: “Moe Gale office is getting its first Main Stem showing and adds another Negro band to the list that now play ofay vaude houses.” (If it sounds a bit weird that’s because of the broader use of an insider-jargon register – the same story’s first sentence is “Erskine Hawkins and his ork are skedded to play the Strand for a five-week stint starting July 20.”)
I first got to appreciate Green’s dictionary when checking out the etymology of ofay: he mentions four circulating etymologies (French au fait, Yoruba ofe, Pig Latin for “foe”, contraction of “old fay”), rejects all of them, and concludes “unknown”.
Yes indeed. The True Etymologist knows how to say “origin unknown.”
Forget au fait. How about au feu!
https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/au_feu
Etymological amateur that he was, Eric Partridge believed that giving an etymology, even if wrong, was preferable to saying “origin unknown.”
Thanks for the link. I have been doing battle with a fellow who refuses to believe me when I say that “chirps” are female jazz singers. Google has not been helpful. This volume says,
CHIRP (n) Girl vocalist
That’s close enough.
@cuchuflete: _Variety_ supposedly once referred to Joni Mitchell as a “chirper/cleffer,” meaning singer-songwriter.
Never mind Google, just go to Green’s for chirp. He cites the “female singer” sense from Cab Calloway’s dictionary, as well as several later sources.
The OED started drawing on the Hepcats Jive Talk Dictionary in the 1970-80s supplements, and has added more citations in OED3: e.g., it’s their earliest citation for army brat. (Green has better and earlier citations for that one.) Green cites it as well a few times.
Of course, both also cite Cab Calloway’s dictionary for various words. (Previously at Language Hat.)
@JWB and KTS,
thanks.
thanks for the pointer to the Jeographical section!
i think “KATY from HAITI, Party girl” is the missing link between cole porter’s Katie Went to Haiti (1939) and kathy acker’s Kathy Goes to Haiti (1978).
but i call foul on “ZANY from ALLEGHENY, Pixillated person.” c’mon, lou! what’s “pixillated” when it’s at home, in 1945?
and now i’m thinking about the larger genre of rhyming place-based nicknames (kennings?), generic like these, or individual, like “the hick from french lick”.
I notice “ofay” in the intro, used apparently without understanding of its slurfulness.
This seems like a book that could have gotten you into a lot of trouble. “Buck” as simply slang for “Colored Man” also seems dubious to me.
OK, Etymonline gives this:
pixilated(adj.)
“mildly insane, bewildered, tipsy,” 1848, pix-e-lated, from pixie + -lated, as in elated, etc., perhaps influenced by or a variant of pixie-led. A New England dialect word popularized 1936 by its use in movie “Mr. Deeds Goes to Town.”
So it seems like the term predates the specialised film term by quite a bit.
I thought at first that Freeby would be what we spell today as “freebie”, but I guess not since it’s listed as an adverb. Does this also mean it’s pronounced with a “by” ending?
So it seems like the term predates the specialised film term by quite a bit. —I would have guessed pixel as an abbreviation of “picture element” was coined as a backronym inspired by the pre-existing word pixilated. However, OED dates pixel to 1965 and pixelate to 1982; maybe the joke was so obvious it was 17 years before it needed explaining?
seemingly non-slurful uses of “ofay” — where the downtrodden work hard to reclaim a slur from the powerful, the powerful can your-puny-weapons laugh away all the slurs of the downtrodden.
Request from 1945 found in the files: “Dear Negroes: Do you folks have a hep-sounding slang term for white people that isn’t actually slurful? If so, we’d like to add it to our own hep lexicon. Thanks in advance, The Hepcats.”
I am reminded of the difficulty in discerning whether the usual Taiwanese word for “mainlander” (meaning the KMT-loyalist emigres who arrived c. 1949 and their descendants), i.e. waishengren, is pejorative or neutral/descriptive. Part of the difficulty is said to be is that classically many of the locals rarely/never talked about the referent in a completely non-pejorative way.
many of the locals rarely/never talked about the referent in a completely non-pejorative way
This reminds me of the Kusaal word Kambʋŋ “Ashanti person”, where speakers identify the -bʋŋ element with bʋŋ “donkey.” I think this is mere folk etymology: the Dagbani cognate Kambɔŋa is used as a self-designation by the traditional Dagomba warrior clan (historically formed of coopted Ashanti musketeers), and the Dagbani for “donkey” is buŋa, not *bɔŋa.
However, a folk etymology can be revealing in its own way – and the Ashanti empire is not fondly remembered by the Kusaasi. A proverb goes:
Ya’a pɛsig Kambuŋ zɔŋo, o faandnɛ dɔɔg.
“Give an Ashanti the hallway, and he’ll take the whole house.”
Mind you, there doesn’t really seem to be a tradition in Western Oti-Volta languages of using animal terms as insults (unlike with Czechs and Mexicans.)
c’mon, lou! what’s “pixillated” when it’s at home, in 1945?
Chris Booth beat me to it, but I didn’t even blink at that entry — anyone who’s read as much popular fiction from the WWII era as I have (mostly sf, but also mysteries and random flotsam) is familiar with that word.
I always took ‘waishengren’ “mainlander” and ‘benshengren’ “native Taiwanese” to be equally descriptive and not necessarily pejorative.
Or just from pixie + -ated + random hiatus filler.
Maybe not; happY-tensing has a complex history (“Missoura” comes to mind).
“Pixilated” in this sense is still in standard dictionaries, in fact without the “dated” label that it probably should have. But since it had white origins and wasn’t specific to hepcats, this dictionary was right to leave it out.
For further confusion, pixilation is also a stop-motion film technique (“and formerly also theatrical”, says OED) dating to the early 20th century.
I defy you not to exclaim YOU MELT ME JACKSON at this vintage footage of the noted lexicographer Mr. Calloway sharing his word-hoard with the Young People. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b3rjQnfm6Yk
Ha, I was just about to link that clip! The 1945 dictionary’s “Webster is dead, long live the Hepster!” was likely stolen directly from there (the movie Sensations of 1945 actually came out in June 1944).
I’d have immediately placed the music in Tom & Jerry.
Both OED and Green’s have 1926 for jive, n.
Here’s a Friday, Nov. 7, 1925 use. The Inter-State Tattler (NY, NY) reporting from Cleveland, Ohio. page 14. col. 1
America’s Historical Newspapers
Ray Smith, the Westinghouse boys have woke up on you and your line of jive. “you can fool some of the people some of the time but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.”
That scene is cited in the OED. Their earliest attestation for this sense of “jive” is Calloway (1938).
Mind you, there doesn’t really seem to be a tradition in Western Oti-Volta languages of using animal terms as insults (unlike with Czechs and Mexicans.)
At least in Mexico, those are friendly terms, much of the time.
You gotta jump an’ jive an’ then you wail away.
Green’s has this lexicographic sense of “jive” as its sense 3, also first dated to 1938 (although different cite than Calloway) but suggests it’s younger than the more pejorative sense 2: “(orig. US black) nonsense, rubbish, insincere, deceitful or pretentious talk.”
That was the sense apparently involved in the slogan “Cut the Jive in ’85,” found on a punk-rock t-shirt that I purchased back in April of ’85, which I am amused to see was as of 2007 on sale (used) at an LA boutique for “the anti-establishment, anticorporate, DIY price of $500.”* Doubt I paid more than $10 but I lost mine somewhere along the way, and anyway it makes me sad to think of how the relevant band did not survive all the way until the end of calendar ’85, with premature death of one of them presumably not having been the jive-cutting strategy intended to be endorsed.
*Use control-F or scroll down at https://www.laweekly.com/the-way-we-wore/
The song is credited to Al Sherman and Harry Tobias, the latter presumably being the lyricist (no doubt in close collaboration with Calloway). Harry’s brother Henry’s autobiography is titled Music in My Heart and Borscht in My Blood. Henry also wrote the 1974 song “Hang In There, Mr. President”, which didn’t work as desired.
Further etymological source material: per wikipedia, the Bee Gee’s 1975 hit “Jive Talkin'” was originally titled “Drive Talking,” because its “rhythm was modelled after the sound their car made crossing the Julia Tuttle Causeway each day from Biscayne Bay to Criteria Studios in Miami.” But then they played an early version for their producer Arif Mardin, and (per Maurice Gibb) “he went ‘Do you know what “Jive Talkin'” means?’ And we said ‘Well yeah, it’s, ya know, you’re dancing.’ […] And he says ‘No, it’s a black expression for bullshitting.’ And we went ‘Oh, really?!?’ … and changed it.” I suppose it had not been part of Australian slang when the Gibb brothers were growing up.
There are too many links to link to for the “jive” scene in Airplane!. Transcripts, ridiculously euphemized subtitles, video interviews, etc., all for the enjoyment of the exacting scholar.
On the non-insultingness of at least “donkey” in West Africa, there’s
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ali_Farka_Tour%C3%A9
(Farka is “donkey” in Songhay.)
Donkeys seems to have a generally good rep in proverbs, too. And in Hausa, ka iya Hausa kamar jakin Kano “you speak Hausa like a Kano donkey” is a compliment on your language skills. No Spanish cows here.
pixilated
o, i wasn’t confused about the meaning – just struck by the absence of “pixilated” itself from the dictionary! having run into it mainly in midcentury sf, i’d taken it as a hepcatism, but i won’t argue with ktschwarz’s take.
Beaver is glossed as ‘beard’. I have an impression that it had another connotation at the time.
Red royal beaver on a bicycle!
https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/hair-here-james-joyce-and-the-eager-beaverers-of-1922-1.3604426
https://www.saturdaygalleryart.com/articles/when-beards-were-beavers
six-seven
The Princeton University library acquired a copy of Cab Calloway’s dictionary a few years ago and celebrated it in a blog post with images of some pages and newspaper clippings about it — one with a photo of a librarian at the University of British Columbia accepting a copy from Calloway himself!
And, only now I find out, there’s an official Hepster’s Dictionary site, where you can buy a licensed reprint and T-shirt.
It’s fitting that Cab Calloway showed up not infrequently on Sesame Street. By his seventies, he had lost a little speed on his feet since Stormy Weather, but he was still great.
Sure, sure but when is Princeton going to pay the big $ to acquire the papers of Lexicographer Extraordinaire Megan Jasper? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grunge_speak
An incomplete scan of Slim Gaillard’s Vout-O-Reenee dictionary is here. I suspect most of these words were not even used by Gaillard himself. But improvise he could and did.
He supposedly knew Armenian and Lebanese Arabic and Greek, hence “KEH-BEH-SAY-NEE-A, Baked wheat and lamb”, and others. Some words are pure Gaillard.