I just returned from a play that was written by some local writers and actors which consisted of vignettes of fictional scenes from the Algonquin Round Table. It got me to wondering just how many common expressions were coined by these people. For example, Dorothy Parker is credited with "One night stand," and I think it was Heywood Broun who coined, "Red baiting." What other common terms did this group of nuts contribute?

Dorothy Parker--

Men don't make passes, at girls who wear glasses.

When one of her friends announced imminent occurence of blessed event a month before actual occurrence, she sent telegram:

Dear Mary: We all knew you had it in you.
Dorothy Parker, telegram to friend who had given birth

I can't resist adding the response from Ogden Nash:

A girl who is bespectacled
Don't even get her nectacled
But safety pins and bassinets
Await the girl who fascinets.

Dorothy Parker, when notified of the death of President Calvin Coolidge:

"How could they tell?"

From a book review:

"This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force."



Also from Dorothy Parker:

"Brevity is the soul of lingerie."

And one of the most famous theatrical quotes/axioms of all-time,
from playwright George S. Kaufman:

"Satire is what closes on Saturday night." hi Max!

well, we're not getting any more coinages, but I couldn't resist this probable repeat verse:

Life is a glorious cycle of song,
A medley of extemporania;
And love is a thing that can never go wrong,
And I am Marie of Romania.
--Dorothy Parker


()

And from Robert Benchley:

"Anyone can do any amount of work, provided it isn't the work he is supposed to be doing."

"Drawing on my fine command of language, I said nothing."

"It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too famous."

If all the sweet young things at that party had been laid end to end I would not have been surprised.

Just one more drink and I'd have been under the host.

In the Algonquin language, Mugwump means "a great man."

Geoff what play did you see? There's a wonderful one-woman-show called "One foot in Scarsdale"
about the inimitable Ms. Parker, which I'd recommend.

This was a locally written play entitled "Vitriol and Violets." It presented some of the Algonquin group's collective history without focusing on any one. I found it to be very amusing, but, considering the material they had to work with, how could they have missed!

One of my favorite Parkerisms© is when asked to use horticulture in a sentence, Ms. Parker replied, "You can lead a whore to culture but you can't make her think."

Love it!
[But I wish I were had someone to feed me such set-up lines for my puns. ]

I tried to post this one, but thee was some kind of glitch in AWAD-talk that gave me an error message saying I had not filled in all the blanks.

Anyway, it reminds me of 1974, when Jerry terHorst, President Ford's press secretary, resigned in protest after Ford pardoned Nixon. People in Washington were of the opinion that you could lead terHorst to Watergate, but you couldn't stop him from thinking.

And this pardon was of course a factor in Ford's subsequent electoral loss to Jimmy Carter.

That is, terHorst came before the Carter.

terHorst came before the Carter.

Horst on his own petard?

She ran the gamut of emotions from A to B (Dorothy Parker about Katherine Hepburn)

I believe she also concluded a lengthy review about a new Hepburn-containing play that conspicuously avoided all mention of her until the very final paragraph -- which then read in its entirety "Miss Hepburn's performance was not up to its usual standard."

What a venomous woman. Though clever.

Some repetition here, but a few new Parquips as well. "Tonstant weader fwowed up" is one of my favorites.

http://users.rcn.com/lyndanyc/dorothy.html

Algonquin (North American Indian)

caribou, caucus, Massachusetts (US state - place near the big little hills), Missouri (US state - town of the large canoes ), moccasins, Oregon (US state - beautiful water), pecan, racoon, terrapin, tomahawk, wigwam (their house), Wisconsin (US state - grassy place), Wyoming (US state - place of the big flats)

also:

"The first genuine Americanisms were undoubtedly words borrowed bodily from the Indian dialects—words, in the main, indicating natural objects that had no counterparts in England. We find opossum, for example, in the form of opasum, in Captain John Smith’s “Map of Virginia” (1612), and, in the form of apossoun, in a Virginia document two years older. Moose is almost as old. The word is borrowed from the Algonquin musa, and must have become familiar to the Pilgrim Fathers soon after their landing in 1620, for the woods of Massachusetts then swarmed with the huge animals and there was no English name to designate them. Again, there are skunk (from the Abenaki Indian seganku), hickory, squash, caribou, pecan, scuppernong, paw-paw, raccoon, chinkapin, porgy, chipmunk, terrapin, menhaden, catalpa, persimmon and cougar. 10 Of these, hickory and terrapin are to be found in Robert Beverley’s “History and Present State of Virginia” (1705), and squash, chinkapin and persimmon are in documents of the preceding century. Many of these words, of course, were shortened or otherwise modified on being taken into colonial English. Thus, chinkapin was originally checkinqumin, and squash appears in early documents as isquontersquash, and squantersquash. But William Penn, in a letter dated August 16, 1683, used the latter in its present form. Its variations show a familiar effort to bring a new and strange word into harmony with the language—an effort arising from what philologists call the law of Hobson-Jobson. This name was given to it by Col. Henry Yule and A. C. Burnell, compilers of a standard dictionary of Anglo-Indian terms. They found that the British soldiers in India, hearing strange words from the lips of the natives, often converted them into English words of similar sound, though of widely different meaning. Thus the words Hassan and Hosein, frequently used by the Mohammedans of the country in their devotions, were turned into Hobson-Jobson."


--Souces of Early Americanisms, The American Language, H.L. Mencken