Whither the rumpus room?

“I guess I was asleep in the rumpus room”: someone on the witness stand, in the Perry Mason episode “The Case of the Dead Ringer” (April 17, 1966).

You don’t hear much about rumpus rooms these days. The Oxford English Dictionary defines rumpus room like so: “originally and chiefly North American[,] a room used for recreation, which does not need to be kept tidy.” Merriam-Webster brings the meaning down to earth: “a room usually in the basement of a home that is used for games, parties, and recreation.” The etymology of rumpus is uncertain; the OED suggests a possible connection to romp. Which makes me realize for the first time ever that the name of the television show Romper Room must have been a play on rumpus room. Now that’s what I call life-long learning.

The OED has a first citation for rumpus room from 1930, from the Wisconsin State Journal:

Cellar space nowadays . . . rejoices in such up-to-date names as “game room,” “smoking room,” and one home owner even calls it his ”rumpus room”!

He must have been quite a card, that home owner. I especially like this citation::

Betty brought university friends home for many good sing-songs and games in the rumpus room which we fixed up in the basement.

That’s from John Hiram Blackburn’s Land of Promise (1970), which Google Books tells me is an account of pioneer farming in Alberta, Canada.

The Google Books Ngram Viewer suggests the waning fortune of the North American rumpus room:

[Rumpus room is really in the basement. Click for a larger room.]

From better days:

[“Fix up that rumpus room the family is longing for!” From an advertisement for Nairn Linoleum. Life, March 17, 1941. Click for a larger view.]

I like this one too. Lexicographers, take note:

[Life, February 19, 1945. Click for a boozier view.]

Clearly, a ping-pong table is de rigueur. I am slightly freaked out by the presence of weapons in each room, especially when the occupants of room no. 2 have given themselves over to drink. Perhaps the host thought to hide the bow that should go with those arrows. As a reader pointed out, they’re darts. But still weapons in the wrong hands!

[Kinsey: there’s a brand name that must have run into complications. But the brand lives on.]

Misheard

“Don’t spend another sleepless night worrying about death.”

Related reading
misheard posts (Pinboard)

[It was a television commercial, about debt.]

Dental jazz in translation

Elaine said no one would figure out my imaginary utterances from the dentist’s chair. She appears to have been right. The utterances, translated:

Ooh EH-ee-uh: Duke Ellington.

Uh-OH-ee-uh UH: Thelonious Monk.

Arh IHN-uh: Charles Mingus.

Notice that each utterance has two parts, each beginning with a capital letter. I thought that would be enough to signal names, after which it would be relatively easy to figure out likely suspects. But see the first paragraph.

No matter: I’m donating $50 anyway, to John Hickenlooper. Goodbye, Cory Gardner.

[Goodbye as well to Susan Collins, Lindsey Graham, Mitch McConnell, and David Perdue. Our household has made a modest contribution to each of their opponents: Sarah Gideon, Jaime Harrison, Amy McGrath, and Jon Ossoff. Mark Kelly seems to be doing well against Martha McSally without our help.]

Stalling vs. declining to act

Curious phrasing in the Illinois news segment dropped into NPR’s Morning Edition this morning: Senate Democrats are seeking to stall any nomination to the Supreme Court. But: In 2016, Senate Republicans declined to act on Barack Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland. The verbs caught my ear.

Merriam-Webster gives the following definitions of stall. As an intranstive verb: “to play for time,” “delay.” As a transitive verb: “to hold off, divert, or delay by evasion or deception.”

To stall a nomination: that phrasing is far more unsavory than decline to act. But Mitch McConnell and company did not decline to act in 2016: their inaction was of course itself a form of action. And a form of stalling: they refused even to start the car.

Dental jazz

This scenario seems to me like something out of Curb Your Enthusiasm. But it really happened. To me.

At the dentist’s office, music plays, always, on satellite radio. Hall and Oates were on. “Do you like them?” the dentist asked. “Oh, sure.” I vaguely recalled the song “Maneater.” What the dentist said he really liked though was jazz. Oh, me too. And as he began working on my mouth, he described what he liked — Bob James, Grover Washington Jr. He liked smooth jazz. Really smooth. His emphasis.

I wanted to say something back about my taste in jazz. Call it vanity: I didn’t want to be mistaken for a fan of smooth jazz. Or call it an insistence on accuracy in aesthetics: I didn’t want smooth jazz to be synonymous with jazz. I wanted to say, “Ooh EH-ee-uh! Uh-OH-ee-uh UH! Arh IHN-uh!” But I couldn’t say a word.

When the work was done and I could speak, I asked my dentist if he had a copy of Kind of Blue. No. “Oh, you should get one. It’ll change your life. It’s by Miles Davis,” I said. Or words to that effect. I hope he followed through.

I’ll make a $50 donation to a Democratic candidate looking to flip a Senate seat if anyone can translate the mouth-open speaking I’ve tried to sound out above. (Why not?) Leave your translation in a comment.

*

No one figured it out. I donated anyway. Answers here.

$50, yes

One of the best uses for my money I can think of today: Jaime Harrison for U.S. Senate. Goodbye, Lindsey Graham.

“All hotels”

William Lindsay Greshman, Nightmare Alley (1946).

Add a blinking neon sign and it’s “the movies,” save that one of the two bedmates would have to have at least one foot on the floor.

Nightmare Alley is available as a New York Review Books Classic.

Also from this novel
“GEEK WANTED IMMEDIATELY” : A “publicity-inflamed dummy”

NYC in color (1937)

Behold, color footage of New York City in 1937. I’m surprised to instantly recognize locations I haven’t seen in many years — the West Side Highway, for instance, and the area along the docks where people sold Christmas trees.

My greatest delight: the benches (at the 12:15 mark), concrete and thick wooden slats, same when I was a kid. Speak, memory!

Thanks to Mike Brown for passing on the link.

“Nov shmoz ka pop?” redux

Look — it’s a hitchhiker.

[Mutts, September 20, 2020. Click for a larger view.]

Today’s Mutts has a guest star: The Little Hitchhiker, a character in Gene Ahern’s comic strip The Squirrel Cage. Ahern was born on September 16, 1895.

The catchphrase “Nov shmoz ka pop?” turned up earlier this year in Zippy.

[Yes, it’s late in the day to be posting something from the comics, but they’re the Sunday comics, and it’s Sunday all day.]

The Mailman

[The Mailman. Encyclopedia Britannica Films (1946).]

Even in 1946, not every “mailman” was male. From a USPS PDF, Women Mail Carriers: “Women have transported mail in the United States since at least the mid-1800s.” See also the National Postal Museum’s online exhibit Women in the U.S. Postal System.

A related film
Your Postal Service