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Regular B&Y readers know I love discovering unknown (to me, at least) bits of slang in old movies. Here's the latest.
I was watching A Letter for Evie (1946), a charming little "B" picture from MGM, and there was a scene wherein one soldier, a handsome hunk of man played by John Carroll, says to his new pal (Hume Cronyn), who is something of a bookish shrimp, "Let's go out and pick up a couple of tomatoes."
"Tomatoes?" asks the nerd.
"Yeah," replies the wolf. "Lollipops. Mice."
Now, "tomatoes" I knew; "lollipops" I'd heard once or twice, but "mice"? That was a new one on me.
It was apparently new to Cronyn's character, too; he puzzled over it, repeating it aloud a couple of times: "Mice??"
So I wondered if maybe it wasn't coined especially for the movie.
Nope, says Jesse Sheidlower, North American editor of the Oxford English Dictionary. The use of "mouse" to refer to a young woman, he tells me, "was very common in the 1940s. There's a unique example from the late eighteenth century, but after that it doesn't turn up again until the late 1910s." (To his credit, Jesse also pegged, without me telling him, which movie I'd heard the term used in -- he's a whiz, I tell you.)
I'm not sure it's a usage that could be considered ripe for revival, but what the heck, it's worth a try. I urge you to use it in a sentence sometime in the next week, even if whomever you're speaking to is likely to be as confused by it as Hume Cronyn was.
Posted by brett at 05:10 PM | TrackBack