The Wilmington morning star., 1947-05-27
AsPeglerSeesh
By w%EsTBROOK PEGLER
1947 by King Features Syndicate

for q ball club Or a moving picture actor,
o. originally was exclusively a baseoall term ana
was an abbreviation of fanatic" l tnlnk IL
first came into use, strictly as sport-slde
slang. about 1900. Sport copy in those days
was done almost entirely IN a Jargon as
laboricus and artificial as the stuff which
;odav is written. but hardly ever spoken, as
the language of 1--WE. One common 1--WE term
the commonest, 1 guess, is unmlstaKaoiy oo-
scene and another slang word IN current use
even bv women. is an abbrevlation OF a dirty
epitnet which came into beng IN the "A. +. r:
in the First World War. Our acceptance OF
several such expressions in the last IS or ~
wears has been a development that might
interest a student Of our morals. Concurfently
we developed a tolerance, even an appetite,
for humor dealing with sexual depraV4ty and
for some other hilarity that is almost COM
pulsory IN musical comedies but can't even
be referred to in a newspaper. We are pretty
nice.
Because the idolators Of moving picture 3eo-
pie wrote so many letters to them, practically
all gratuitous mail came to be known as
fan mail. This certainly is a b%elittlng gener-
atty as to most OF the spontaneous letters
received bv a cosmic columnist. Some Of them
are beautiful expressions of idealism and prin-
ciple, some reveal important and
among them consistently are scholarly argu-
ments.
The term ham," meaning an actor whether
on the stage, the screen or the radlt. is an
abbreviation of the common, slightly derislve
name for actors about the turn Of the cen
tury-ham-fat or ham-fatter. I have heard
that it came from the fact that, before the
higher development of cosmetics and make
up, the actor creased his face with the inner
surface Of a slab Of ham, or bacon rind to
lay a base for the powder and paint.
Until a few years ago, "hammy'' was the
word tor a STACEY or over-dramatic play. 1t
gave way to "corny.' I can't trace "corny"
to any origin and, like "ballyhoo," which for
merry was a circus term only, and 'stooge,"
it just moved into our current speech and
writing and is a probationer for acceptance
into the American language Of which Henry
of Baltimore, is the editor and prop.
One old baseball term that qualified as
good Aclericanese is ''boner." This is an alb
breviation of "bonehead play" The first man
to use this form was T. A. Dorgan, or Tad,
the sport-page cartoonist of the Hearst papers
had a baseball character called Bone
head Barry, the bush league bear.
We owe 'bonehead'' and ''boner'' to him.
We gave very little space to sport stuff in
the early 1905 by comparison with today's
coverage and, although we did have
some pretty good writers, actually most OF
the copy was awful. The sport writer's strained
terribly to substitute slang for ineligible Eng
lish, ard so a base was not stolen but pill
ferod or purloined or even 2aneered. which
I believe was a corruption OF a Jewish word,
and the bases were hassocks and pitchers
twirlers. A left-hander was and still is
called a southpaW, but ''portsider' is strictly
neWspaperese and l never heard it used by
ballplayers. Ring Lardner sometimes called
a left-hander a cock-eye in his fiction pieces
and he probably heard some ballplayer use
it. because he had a fine ear for their talk.
II rnaS;or M~on Eropnne DarEipc' cfor,, about
D. Roosevelt l came on several in
stances where she used the word teasing"
which tended to confirm my impression that
Mrs. Perkins is a stuffy old lady. She tells
us that F. D. R. was a great "tease" and
that he loved to tease" Winston Churchill,
when kid or rib would have been more
20 ate. I guess Mrs. Perkins would still
call d foolish person a mutt, instead OF a
sap or mugg, or say"go way back and sit
down. instead OF why don't you take gas?'
But l certainly would have bet on old Church
ill in rspartee with Roosevelt under even con-
ditions. He would have murdered mama's
"Bimbc' never did have any standing in
our slang as an equivalent Of mutt or sap
meaning = woman Of trampish character.
Mutt meaning a mongrel dog, is good
American slang Of course.
Sock is a corruption Of soak. Soak was
both a verb and a noun, used IN baseball
and boxing copy, and was very robust in its
time, although if you were to say today a
hitter soaked one to right or a fighter hit
another one a hard soak, people would give
you a look. Sock served a term, then be-
came obsolete, and then, just after the other
war. strangely came back and has been with
us ever since.
'Bift,' as a verb and noun, was contem-
porar eous with soak but, having vanished,
never came back. Insthe days that l am re-
calling, and without nostalgia, because it
makes a fellow sheepish now just to remem-
Der language that was regarded as the last
word, then a dollar was called a "smacker."
That passed and then, after the other war,
it came back as srnacker and still hangs on.
"Plunk" and "simoleon''a curled and died and
so did ''spondulix," meaning money generally,
and "kale" and "tin." Dough was current
even then. though. We had no early equiva-
lars. o" c, meaning . hundred, which came
from the prohibition underworld, but saw
buck and t'double-saw'' for 10 and 20 are
pretty cid and the term "she-note' for a
two-dollar bill had to go, regardless. because
the she-note itself became practically a mu-
scum piece except a brief time during the
second war when Americans entering Mexico
had to change their cash into two-dollar bills.
Whence it came I have no idea. In the Mid
WesI and the West it was an old custom to
lay a mythical hex or jinx by tearing a little
snip off the corner Of a she-note and people
solemnly did it much more often than they
didn't. Hex is a relatively new word which
came ou. of an Amisn colony Of Pennsylvania
meaning a sort Of jinx. l thought "jinx' was
slang but 1 see it is a dictionary word Of
Greek origin. But l don't find 'jody' in the
dictionary and jody used to- mean a hex or
. ink.
/ hesitate 70 recall that currently clever