Number
207
______________________________________________
LOVE ME FOR MY FLOY-FLOY
ALONE
Last week I referred to an old song, Flat-Footed Floogie, which goes:
Oh, the flat foot floogie with a floy, floy... (listen to the Louis Armstrong clip online)
Anne DaBee, among others, thought these are just nonsense words. Ella Fitzgerald sang the song and we know her as a scat singer. But usually pure nonsense words or scat words are not arranged in a grammatical sentence like the one above. Another song of the era, "Mairzy Doats", also sounded nonsensical, but was grammatical, and could be heard as "Mares eat oats" etc. The song was inspired by a British nursery rhyme, "Cowzy tweet and sowzy tweet and libble sharksy doisters."
Our very own Brit, Mike Sykes, looked in the OED and found:
Surely /floogie/ is just another alternative spelling of
"*floosie*, *floozie*, *floozy"*, as the OED has it. As for 'floy
floy', the nearest I can get is the adjective /floy/, an "Alleged
Americanism for: Dirty, foul". Make of that what you can, but it doesn't
sound very complimentary.
Although some of you thought these were just nonsense words, the floozy etymology sounds reasonable.
But "floy" doesn't sound like any word I can think of meaning dirty. Besides, it's used as a noun in the song. The only other place I've read floy-floy was in a sketch by S. J. Perelman*, which I can't locate right now. I'm sure he was referring to that song, and to the jitterbug culture. It was a World War II romance. Girl and boy meet at a dance hall, both love to jitterbug. Girl falls in love but has doubts because the young man is not serving in the military, he works at a perfume factory. Turns out he owns the factory, which has been assigned war-time work with chemicals, but he concealed this because he wanted to find a girl who "loved him for his floy-floy alone." Which seemed to mean his dancing, or perhaps a dance move. Perelman loved words and I can imagine him inventing this bit of silliness just in order to write that sentence.
*(One of the Perelman web sites that turned up called him a "hearty perennial." The phrase is "hardy perennial", a gardening term that refers to perennial plants that are tough enough to survive cold winter. Perelman keeps being discovered by new readers because his humor survives.)
By the way, if you wonder what these songs sound like, or if you remember them but don't own the album/tape/CD/download, I discovered that YouTube is a good place to find songs, either video clips of TV performances or amateur videos. A sweetie named Moe sang Mairzy Doats for us. And you can find a couple of clips of Flat-Foot Floogie with dancers, wherein I learned that floogie is pronounced both floo-gee and floo-jee. I've linked you to the clip with a kind of lame jitterbug group.
Mike Sykes also wrote about Boxing Day (the day after Christmas):
To what extent we 'observe' is hard to say. But we still give what is essentially a tip to the lad who delivers our papers, and some also do likewise for milkmen and garbage collectors. It's quite unusual to refer to Xmas presents large or small to friends and relatives as "Christmas boxes".
Americans also tip the paperboy etc., but for some reason we did not carry over the name or the December 26 date for this custom, which makes me think that possibly it developed after the 16th or 17th century.
BOLO
Tim Bazzett entered this for our consideration: bolo.
Both times I went through basic combat
training (BCT) at Ft Leonard Wood, MO, I had to qualify with a rifle, the first
time (in 1962) with an M-1, and the second time (in 1976) with an M-16. The
trainee's biggest dread during rifle training and qualification fire was that
he would "bolo." At the time no one could tell me where the term came
from but we all understood that a bolo was someone who hadn't qualified with
his weapon and had let the rest of his unit down.
Not too long ago I picked up an interesting
little book called Soldiers of the Old Army, by Victor Vogel (Texas
A&M University Press, 1990).... Vogel finally answered my question about
the origins of the term "bolo."
A man who could not score high enough to qualify with at least a rating of marksman was a "bolo" and considered a disgrace to the regulars. The term bolo originated in the Philippine insurrection, when the heavy, long knife was commonly used by the Moros. If a man could not shoot well he could always use a bolo. (p. 40)
Tim says he did know a bolo is a knife. He also remembered a song called "Hula Love" by Buddy Knox that had something about the young chieftain saying, "my bolos I'm swingin'/Come be my hula-hula love/Oo-wa oo-wa oo-wa."
And what about the bolo (or bola) tie?
Chris J. passed on a bit of nostalgia going around the web, listing words we don't use anymore, like fender skirts and curb feelers and running boards because cars mostly don't have them anymore. Her e-mail had photo illustrations too. Steering knobs (which I didn't know were also called suicide knobs or necker knobs) are probably still installed for people with only one working hand, but they used to be considered either cool or uncool, depending on your point of view. I never heard foot feed for accelerator (gas pedal).
I used to hear store-bought, and used store-boughten in a novella (unpublished) I wrote about the Sears catalogues. (Note that I'm not spelling it catalogs.)
AirAmerica Radio has a program called The Young Turks. I had a general impression that "young Turks" is a slang expression meaning aggressive, ambitious, young people. Apparently the term came from the Young Turks movement in Turkey of a century ago. According to Wikipedia, "They bequeathed to Atatürk the conviction that reformers should seize state power and then use it ruthlessly for their own ends, not to democratize society in ways that would weaken the centralized state." Historians (except for Turkish historians) blame them for the Armenian massacre. "Young Turks" is usually a sort of grudgingly admiring expression for arrogant young people who want power in business or politics, but the very brief review of history that I just did would make me want to disassociate myself from that history.
Last week when I thanked you for not being too touchy to read about language, I didn't complete my thought. You are people who enjoy reading and thinking about the English language. The real problem is when the subject isn't purely grammar, it's politics or religion or culture or something else that language is about. Some or many of you do not always agree with me about issues outside of grammar, yet you continue to read. When you disagree, most of you ignore what you don't like, or you make reasonable arguments. It's been tough when a couple of readers (not strangers to me, as some of you are) reacted emotionally, even to the point of signing off permanently. As someone once said, the mind tends to be an opinion-reinforcing machine. Over the years I've occasionally, sometimes grudgingly, read or listened outside my comfort zone, and occasionally, sometimes grudgingly, I've changed my ideas. I can almost hear the rusty gears shifting when that happens. Sometimes it doesn't happen, even with plenty of oil. So once again, thanx and a tip of the hat to you.
WHEN
SONNY GETS BLUE! Check out the video clips of
Sonny Robertson and the Howard Street Blues Band at www.sonnyrobertson.com and
www.youtube.com/rondaria.
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25:2
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