Bachelorettes, free-fire zones, and zambonis à gogo

Well I was just talking about the verb OD in another thread.

Word omitted from the first sentence in the à gogo entry.

I long that that this word had something to do with go-go dancing, but no.

gaslighting, It makes no difference to the thrust of the entry but I can’t help mentioning that the original Gaslight movie (superior in my opinion to the remake) came out in 1940. It was British and starred the great Anton Walbrook.

à gogo, adj. I long that that this word had something to do with go-go dancing, but no.

Aside from the missing word, it actually does have something to do with go-go dancing; as I wrote elsewhere on this subject, the English phrase comes from the Whiskey A Go-Go, America’s first disco, which opened on the Sunset Strip in LA in January 1964. The name was taken from a similar French joint, where the name meant “as much whiskey as you want” or “whiskey to your heart’s content” (à gogo means ‘plenty of’), but in America it was just a catchy phrase, and “go-go” came to mean ‘the kind of music/girls/scene you find at the Whisky.’

Now, while the word may have been originated here—the 1965 citation in the dictionary is from Toronto and refers to “the delights open to the ‘bachelorette’ who has left her family and is in no hurry to get married"—but it certainly is no longer “chiefly Canadian.”

You need to delete either “while” or “but.”

Godzilla, n. Gojira, known as Godzilla in the Western world and who first destroyed Tokyo in 1954

Syntax doesn’t work; a minimum fix would be to add “who is” before “known.”

log-in, n. Another computing term sees the light of day, although the verb to log-in is recorded two years earlier.

The verb doesn’t have a hyphen.

maricon, n. The epithet for a gay man makes its way into American English from Spanish.

Easily antedated; e.g., from Love and the Spanish, by Nina Epton (World, 1962), p. 87: “‘I’ll send you our maricón — he will do it,’ she said. The consul’s wife, believing that this was the lad’s name, received him graciously, as she thought, by saying brightly: ‘Good day, Maricón,’ and then proceeding to give him orders.”

zine, n. This is a clipping of the 1949 term fanzine.

The Oxford Dictionary of SF antedates this one to 1944 ("The Check-List also gives variant names of a given zine")!

Thanks.

Seeing “a gogo” made me wonder about the origins of a word of similar meaning, “galore”. I would’ve guessed French, but it turns out it is from the Irish.

And the only other thing I have to say is that the woman who runs the drink stall near here pronounces “Coke Zero” rather like Gojiro, so I always order that.

OP Tipping - 09 April 2012 05:23 AM

Seeing “a gogo” made me wonder about the origins of a word of similar meaning, “galore”. I would’ve guessed French, but it turns out it is from the Irish.

The same expression (gu leòr, “to sufficiency") is found in Scots Gaelic, and it’s certainly because of the Scots Gaelic version that the word appears in the title of Compton MacKenzie’s comic novel of 1947 (made into a film in 1949) set in the Hebrides, which, curiously, is an exact translation of Whiskey à gogo - Whisky Galore!. Indeed, I see that Wikipedia claims that “In France, the movie was retitled Whisky à Go-Go, after the famous Paris discothèque, which had opened two years before.[citation needed]”. In the US, however, both book and film were renamed Tight Little Island, because (according to Wikipedia, again) “a ban existed at the time on using the names of alcoholic drinks in titles.”

I’m suspicious about the claim that there was a “ban” on the use of alcohol in U. S. movie titles. It doesn’t sound like it would square with the first amendment. There was the Motion Picture Production Code (a. k. a., the Hays code), which was an industry-run effort, but as far as I know that had no proscriptions about alcohol at all—just think of all the W. C. Fields or William Powell films and all the other old movies where drinking is de rigueur. There does seem to be a dearth of movies from that era with whisky, whiskey, or wine in the title when I search IMDB, but that could just be studio marketing departments being reluctant to use titles that might offend middle-America, rather than an actual ban.

I’m suspicious about the claim that there was a “ban” on the use of alcohol in U. S. movie titles. It doesn’t sound like it would square with the first amendment.

No one is saying there was a legal ban, so the First Amendment doesn’t come into play; I presume the suggestion is that it was the same kind of informal but firm agreement that kept studios from hiring suspected communists, and it sounds plausible to me.