This is a fun exercise from just about any perspective. Digging around this page, you can unearth a ton of stuff: some old, some new, some borrowed and some blue. The text is from Mae West's novel, Babe Gordon (1930), reprinted as The Constant Sinner. Let's poke around a little, shall we?
X-ray lamps. What the hell are those? These are probably not medical X-ray lamps at a boxing match, so must be a slang term from the 1920s. The term "X-ray" was coined in the late 1800s.
"The restless spectators were howling and stamping for the bouts to begin." Could apply to anything from a Roman gladiator fight to a Duke-UNC basketball game. Timeless human nature.
Aisle seats. These go back at least to the ancient Greeks, eh?
"Old-timers of the fight club." Old-timers = veterans, experienced people. The term goes back to just before the American Civil War (1861-1865), if not earlier.
Fight club. I have no idea when or where this idea began, but clearly Mae West's text -- written during the 1920s -- spells it out a long time prior to Chuck Palahniuk's hugely influential 1996 novel, Fight Club, which was adapted into a 1999 film starring Brad Pitt.
Folks, that's just the first four sentences of one page . . . see what I mean?
Today's Rune: The Mystery Rune.
Interesting. A lot of those elements call to mind boxing immediately to me. I think part of that is from reading Robert E. Howard's boxing stories from the 20s and 30s, which expressed some of this same lingo.
ReplyDeleteCool beans, man. Lingo rules !
ReplyDeleteErik-the word 'dame' cracks me up! So does 'broads'!
ReplyDelete