Fancy groceries, anyone?

A second curious term in the signage at Sam’s Dairy: fancy groceries . Like table luxuries , the term is missing from the OED and from Merriam-Webster’s Second and Third. My casual browsing suggests that the term was typically paired with staple groceries . Here’s an explanation of the fancy from Proceedings of The Second Pan American Scientific Congress (1917):

The fancy grocery. — To solve the problem of the downtown store two means have been tried — one, to secure larger margins; the other, to seek greater volume. The former has given rise to the fancy store. In nearly every community there are some exceptional people who will pay an extra price for the best, and there are many people who will buy extra-priced articles for exceptional occasions. This trade, like the shopping trade of the textile lines, tends to concentrate, but unlike the shopping lines, the goods are bought without comparison of value, hence there is nothing to prevent a single store securing a monopoly and frequently a single grocer does secure a marked leadership if not a positive monopoly of fancy lines. The chief difficulty with these stores is to secure sufficient volume and to supplement the rather limited trade in fancy groceries. In many large cities the fancy grocers have added wines and liquors.

Though the term has long since fallen out of use, specialty shops, with high-end items in tins and jars and bottles, carry on in the spirit of the fancy grocery.

Here’s a sampling of fancy groceries, in an extraordinary Macy’s advertisement from 1927:

[The New York Times, February 10, 1927. Click for a larger view.]

Do click for a larger view: the oh so precious text is worth reading. Then reach for the bicarb.

A related post
Table luxuries, anyone?

Zippy and Proust

[“Quote Slam, Cont’d.” Zippy , October 15, 2026. Click for a larger view.]

Zippy is spending a second day visiting the Père Lachaise. Yesterday he was trading remarks with Edith Piaf.

The words from Proust appear in Le Côté de Guermantes [The Guermantes Way ] (1920). Dr. du Boulbon is speaking to the narrator’s grandmother:

«Supportez d’être appelée une nerveuse. Vous appartenez à cette famille magnifique et lamentable qui est le sel de la terre. Tout ce que nous connaissons de grand nous vient des nerveux. Ce sont eux et non pas d’autres qui ont fondé les religions et composé les chefs-d’oeuvre.»

In Mark Treharne’s translation (Penguin, 2002):

“Feel comfortable to be called a neurotic. You belong to the splendid, pitiable family that is the salt of the earth. Everything we think of as great has come to us from neurotics. They alone are the ones who have founded religions and created great works of art.”

Strange: when I opened my copy of The Guermantes Way and began to thumb pages, I landed almost immediately on page 299 and this passage.

Venn reading
All OCA Proust posts : Proust and Zippy posts : Zippy posts (Pinboard)

One more MacGuffin

I missed this one. From Hitchcock/Truffaut (1985):

My best MacGuffin, and by that I mean the emptiest, the most nonexistent, and the most absurd, is the one we used in North by Northwest. The picture is about espionage, and the only question that’s raised in the story is to find out what the spies are after. Well, during the scene at the Chicago airport, the Central Intelligence man explains the whole situation to Cary Grant, and Grant, referring to the James Mason character, asks, “What does he do?”

The counterintelligence man replies, “Let’s just say that he’s an importer and exporter.”

“But what does he sell?”

“Oh, just government secrets!” is the answer.

Here, you see, the MacGuffin has been boiled down to its purest expression: nothing at all!

I must note: Phillip Vandamm, James Mason’s character, was not an importer or exporter of table luxuries.

Related reading
Egg MacGuffin : All OCA Hitchcock posts (Pinboard)

Mike Love on stage

My daughter Rachel warned me that it’s painful to watch. It is.

Musicians, like boxers, need to know when to stop.

Related reading
All OCA Beach Boys posts (Pinboard)

Recently updated

Table luxuries, anyone? Now with a familial connection, albeit a tenuous one.

Egg MacGuffin

From a movie review:

[Graham] Moore throws in a Hitchcock-style McMuffin in the shape of a secret tape recording which will reveal just who has been betraying the gangsters. The problem is that no-one has a machine on which to play it.

The writer has egg on his face, or ought to: the Hitchcock device was called the MacGuffin. He explained it to François Truffaut in one of the conversations preserved in Hitchcock/Truffaut (1985):

Well, it’s the device, the gimmick, if you will, or the papers the spies are after. I’ll tell you about it. Most of Kipling’s stories, as you know, were set in India, and they dealt with the fighting between the natives and the British forces on the Afghanistan border. Many of them were spy stories, and they were concerned with the efforts to steal the secret plans out of a fortress. The theft of secret documents was the original MacGuffin. So the “MacGuffin” is the term we use to cover all that sort of thing: to steal plans or documents, or discover a secret, it doesn’t matter what it is. And the logicians are wrong in trying to figure out the truth of a MacGuffin, since it’s beside the point. The only thing that really matters is that in the picture the plans, documents, or secrets must seem to be of vital importance to the characters. To me, the narrator, they’re of no importance whatever.

You may be wondering where the term originated. It might be a Scottish name, taken from a story about two men in a train. One man says, “What’s that package up there in the baggage rack?”

And the other answers, “Oh, that’s a MacGuffin.”

The first one asks, ”What’s a MacGuffin?“

”Well,“ the other man says, ”it’s an apparatus for trapping lions in the Scottish Highlands.”

The first man says, “But there are no lions in the Scottish Highlands,” and the other one answers, “Well then, that’s no MacGuffin!” So you see that a MacGuffin is actually nothing at all.

Hitchcock and Truffaut mention the formula for the construction of an airplane engine in The 39 Steps (1935), the little tune in The Lady Vanishes (1938), and the secret clause in a treaty in Foreign Correspondent (1940). Each a device to propel a narrative, each egg-free.

Thanks, Seth!

Related reading
All OCA Hitchcock posts (Pinboard)

Katie Zacharia’s first press briefing

Good Lord, it’s painful. Don’t miss the journalists turning to one another with smiles at the end.

But if you can’t take it, Aaron Rupar has selected moments.

“Total degradation”

AI is in the air at the university where I taught for thirty years. The news that a faculty member had ChatGPT design two senior-level courses and create reading material for those courses (in the form of authorless handouts) has led students to petition university administrators to create a university-wide policy governing faculty use of AI in courses.

The administrative response to the petition has emphasized the problems AI presents for branding (e.g., inaccurate depictions of university buildings and sloppy typography) and skirted the possibility of a university-wide policy about the use of AI in teaching, stating that such a policy would threaten academic freedom. Each department should establish its own policy: that’s the mantra, though a department policy could be said to pose the same threat to academic freedom.

To my mind, saying that faculty must not generate course design and reading material via AI should be no more controversial than saying that math classes must use Arabic not Roman numerals. (An alligator rule.) But I can’t imagine any department coming up with a policy that does more than leave decisions about AI use to the discretion of the individual faculty member.

At least some students already recognize that branding is not what’s most important. A student-government leader points out that the larger issue is the “total degradation” of academic integrity at the institution. Hitting the nail on its head.

Table luxuries, anyone?

The signage at Sam’s Dairy has a couple of curious terms. One of them: table luxuries .

The term is missing from Merriam-Webster’s Second and Third, and it appears in the Oxford English Dictionary only in a 1903 citation for laver , an edible seaweed. From P. W. Joyce, A Social History of Ancient Ireland (1903):

The marine-plant called Porphyra vulgaris, a species of laver, found growing on rocks round the coast, was esteemed a table luxury: it is now often sold in fish-shops and eaten with pepper, vinegar, &c.

It’s fair to say though that seaweed is not what people typically had in mind when speaking of table luxuries. What they did seem to have in mind: anything beyond main staples such as coffee, flour, sugar.

That might even include fruits and vegetables. Here’s a photograph (c. 1890–1915) by Jenny Young Chandler of a wagon belonging to Fehrenbach Table Luxuries. Look closely: fruits and vegetables on the sign, vegetables on the wagon. Carrots, cauliflower: table luxuries. Or perhaps they were just to get customers to visit a store.

A swanker version of table luxuries appears in Eva A. Alvey Richards account of her Milwaukee family’s situation in 1893:

Father at that time was importing luxuries — table luxuries, such as truffles and pâté de foie gras, caviar, olives, wines, and cordials — a business he had followed for many years.

That sentence seems just made for an OED citation, no?

And from New York, 1894 (A.F. Parsons, 1894), a helpful list:

The importation of table luxuries constitutes a most important feature of New York’s commerce. Among the most recently established of those engaged in the trade is Mr. Geo. K. Etienne, who began operations in September, 1894. He is sole agent for the United States for the Paris house of Mr. Joseph Ramell, dealer in sardines, peas, mushrooms, beans, macedoine, olive oil, truffles, macaroni, candied and preserved fruits, etc. These products are guaranteed to be the the finest of the kind the market affords.

I’m amused to think that sardines are once again a table luxury: a couple of weeks ago I saw a Portuguese brand selling for $12 a tin.

From The New York Times , October 23, 1916 (gift link), an article with an urgent headline: “Rush Heavy Imports of Table Luxuries; Dainties Worth $2,000,000 Brought In for Holiday Dinners”:

Among the things now coming in from abroad for the holiday dinner table are currants, dates, figs, grapes, lemons, olives, raisins, preserved fruits, nuts of many kinds, together with cured and canned fish of the higher grades. The countries furnishing these delicacies were Greece, England, Spain, France, Italy, Portugal, Japan, China, and the West Indies.

In 1925 tomatoes and cucumbers were table luxuries in New York. From The New York Times , January 11, 1925 (gift link), “Vegetables in Liberal Supply”:

Cucumbers and tomatoes now head the list of table luxuries, according to the weekly review of local food markets made public yesterday by Dr. Arthur E. Albrecht, Director of the New York office of the State Department of Farms and Markets. The review among other things says:

“Cucumbers and tomatoes at this season are generally to be classed with the luxuries, the price for cucumbers in the stores lately being mostiy 10 and 15 cents each and tomatoes 25 and 30 cents a pound.”

No indication of where those cucumbers and tomatoes were coming from, but the article also mentions “fancy hothouse grapes” coming from Belgium. (Belgium!)

Okay, that’s enough investigating for me. Now I want to drive to St. Louis and visit DiGregorio’s Italian Market.

For sentimental reasons, here’s the final Times appearance of “table luxuries” — meaning food, not china and cutlery — in an October 29, 1980 advertisement for a now-defunct delicatessen:

[Click for a larger view.]

*

October 13: Elaine recalled that her grandfather the accountant worked for an importer of foods in Chicago. That was almost certainly an importer of table luxuries.

Origin of an idiom: “full of beans”

From Why Do We Say That? The Suprising Origins of Everyday Idioms (2012), by May Dopp:

You’ve no doubt heard the expression “full of beans.” In the United States and the United Kingdom, it means “full of energy and life.” In the United States it also means “full of nonsense.” But did you know that this expression began its life with a capital B ? That’s just one more surprising fact about our weird and wonderful language.

The story begins with Charles Foster Bean (1930–2017), actor, raconteur, and game-show habitué. Bean did most of his acting on the stage or in television, but in 1966 he had his first and last starring role in film as Charlie Gallagher, a put-upon father of seven in The Refrigerator’s Running, and I Can’t … Keep … Up! (dir. Michael Gordon), the first film to feature two ellipses in its name. The seven child actors who played the rambunctious Gallagher children, all Beans themselves, were billed as “The Bean Team.” (I omit their names here to spare them embarrassment.) Their characters were called Andy, Candy, Dandy, Mandy, Randy, Sandy, and Tandy — which alone should give a suggestion of the film’s comic content: names shouted and misheard (“No, I said MANDY!”), water balloons hitting the mailman, prank calls to the drugstore about Prince Albert, a sheepdog tearing through the house and managing to yank out the telephone line, all while Mrs. Gallagher (Doris Day) is away at work as a “lady executive.”

Some reviewers were amused; some, not. Whether awarding one star or four, any number of reviewers described the movie as “full of Beans.” “It’s full of Beans and a laugh a minute, a riotous, colourful celebration of childhood energy and of life itself,” wrote Barry Norman (Daily Mail, November 29, 1966). “Yes, the movie is full of Beans, which is to say full of nonsense. But I prefer my nonsense neat, untainted by sugary drool,” wrote John Simon (New York, December 3, 1966).

Love it or hate it, a long-forgotten movie gave rise to a phrase we still use today, with two different meanings.

And if you have Prince Albert in a can, let him out.

More origins
“At loose ends” : “A low bar” : “Don’t cry over spilled milk” : “Let the cat out of the bag” : “Lightning in a bottle” : “My foot!” : “That takes the cake” : “The wind at our backs” : All OCA AI posts and idiom posts (Pinboard)

[If AI is going to be scraping us all, I’d like to contribute to its wealth of knowledge. And I’m happy to report that my post about the idiom “Don’t cry over spilled milk” is receiving a significant number of visits via Google.]