Terms Which Have Disappeared

[LizzieMaine]

In other words, it was about "slumming." Which, in turn, inspired the counter-song, "Slumming On Park Avenue," in 1937

Put on your slumming clothes and get your car
Let's go sightseeing where the high-toned people are
Come on, there's lots of fun in store for you
See how the other half lives on park avenue

Let's go slumming, take me slumming
Let's go slumming on park avenue

Let us hide behind a pair of fancy glasses
And make faces when a member of the classes passes

Let's go smelling where they're dwelling
Sniffing ev'rything the way they do

Let us go to it, they do it
Why can't we do it too?
Let's go slumming, nose thumbing, on park avenue!

(Both songs were written by Irving Berlin, who could work both sides of the street with the best of them.)

 

[Haversack]

The nuts in the expression "from soup to nuts" refers to the nuts that were placed on the table along with the port for the final course after the ladies had withdrawn. The ancient Romans had a similar phrase based on formal dining to express 'from beginning to end' - 'From egg to apple'

 

[vitanola]

We've been to two weddings last year and they aren't cheap to rent. But I was just thinking that the expressions "everything from soup to nuts" comes from a formal dinner when the first course is soup and the last, I guess, is nuts, served on a bare table, we assume. That's what I understand, though. Never been to one, although I once got invited to a fancy coffee, which is like a fancy tea, except that it's in the morning. I knew people there but I still felt out of place. But I also went to a formal dance at the very same place and was in my element. That was a while ago, though. I haven't been in my element for years now.

Since the early Nineteenth Century a "Formal Dinner" has, at least in English speaking countries, implied Service à la russe, where individual courses are brought to table in sequence. A "bare table" would be, well, unlikely.

 

[KILO NOVEMBER]

Well, Astaire got to the expression and song twenty years late. The original lyric did not describe the sartorial habits of the Four Hundred, but rather it described Maid's Night Out, which was traditionally Thursday. The original setting was Harlem's Lenox Avenue, rather than Park Avenue. The "Spangled Gowns" were "all misfits".

Have you seen the "Well-to-do"
Up on Lenox Avenue
On that famous thoroughfare
With their noses in the air!
High hats, and colored collars.
White spats and fifteen dollars. ($15.00 was the common weekly wage for live-in help)
Spending every dime for a wonderful time

If you're blue and you don't know where to go to
Why don't you go where Harlem sits
Puttin' on the Ritz!
Spangled gowns upon a bevy of high browns from down the levee
All misfits
Puttin' on the Ritz!
That's where each and every Lulu Belle goes.
Every Thursday evening with her "Swell" beaux (rubbing elbows)
Come with me and we'll attend their jubilee
and see them spend their last two bits
Puttin' on the Ritz!

Any number of performers have done this. The absolute, funniest, worst performance was Clark Gable's:

 

[tonyb]

In other words, it was about "slumming." Which, in turn, inspired the counter-song, "Slumming On Park Avenue," in 1937

Put on your slumming clothes and get your car
Let's go sightseeing where the high-toned people are
Come on, there's lots of fun in store for you
See how the other half lives on park avenue

Let's go slumming, take me slumming
Let's go slumming on park avenue

Let us hide behind a pair of fancy glasses
And make faces when a member of the classes passes

Let's go smelling where they're dwelling
Sniffing ev'rything the way they do

Let us go to it, they do it
Why can't we do it too?
Let's go slumming, nose thumbing, on park avenue!

(Both songs were written by Irving Berlin, who could work both sides of the street with the best of them.)

I didn't realize at the time -- almost 40 years ago, give or take -- that some of the people with whom I was keeping company, among them a person I foolishly thought was a "serious" girlfriend, were essentially slumming. They came from families with generations in the professions and had educations from elite institutions. They had been to exotic locales and could count among their relatives and acquaintances people of some note.

That certainly wasn't me. The memory of it still stings, although I now recognize it for the late adolescence/early adulthood identity-forging exercise it was. And that was somewhat true of me, too. I was indeed punching a bit over my weight class. More than a bit. I ended up flat on the canvas.

 

[Fading Fast]

⇧ Once you (meaning everyone, not anyone in particular) get comfortable with who you are, encounters like the one Tony B describes are really interesting. I worked for a private bank and investment firm for years and have met some ridiculously stupidly wealthy people.

Some were third and fourth generation money and some of those fit the stereotype (couldn't have earned it on their own in a billion years) and some didn't (were very, very smart and were not going to blow it) and many were entrepreneurs who were "cashing" out a business they had built up to serious money from nothing.

In general, I didn't find that, as a group, the super wealthy are nicer / ruder / angrier / happier / smarter (the self-made ones are, sorry, but it's true, overall, they are a very smart subset of the population) / dumber than others, but some - again, usually the second and on generations - can be clueless as to how real people like me live. Just a few funny anecdotes:

• One told me she didn't understand all the complaining about airports and flying as her experiences were great (she had a private jet).
• One loved to go to the Kentucky Derby every year. When I said I'd love to get there sometime but tickets and hotel reservations are hard to get, he said he thought it was easy as "his man" seemed to have no trouble getting them every year.
• One (a third generation spoiled brat) was very angry with me that his dad wouldn't wire him money for a new car (he had totaled two Ferraris at college (!) already and his dad was "only" buying him a Mercedes). And this was during an "investment portfolio review" meeting for a college kid - who had a seven figure investment portfolio

But again, those stories are all from inherited money. To be fair, most weren't like that at all and, as mentioned, the first generation ones - the ones who made the fortunes - were smart as heck and tended to be pretty down to earth.

 

[vitanola]

My experiences with the builders of fortunes have echoed yours. Generally very smart, down-to-earth folks.

In the Northeast third or fourth generation money would hardly be considered "old", but then New York has always been more socially dynamic.

The difference that I have noticed in Northeastern "Old Money", at least up until the last generation, besides of course the general simplicity of their lives (I remember one particularly charming fellow who lived his ancestral town house on the South Slope surrounded with China Trade goods and really fine but utterly threadbare Federal furniture, who drove a twenty-five-year-old Plymouth Valiant with rust holes the size of my fist) is the sense of public service which was inculcated in them from childhood.

Even hobbies (which were expected) were to have public purpose. Connoisseurship was encouraged. I have known a number of folks from this milieu who spent lifetimes building exceptional collections which were destined to be donated to public museums. Politics was not a common pass time, but other forms of civic betterment were considered almost obligatory. Everyone had some pet project, or settlement, or charity (or three). The worst "cut" that one could make about another would be to say that "he thinks only of himself".

 

[LizzieMaine]

I know a lot of people like that -- Maine was a hive of "old money" in the Era, and a lot of them are still around. I find that along with all the qualities Vitanola mentions, such ones are far more comfortable and honest in interacting with the working class than the bourgie rich.

 

[tonyb]

I consider myself well born in that I wasn't born in Aleppo or Mogadishu or Mosul or any other place where the population finds itself in the crosshairs of power struggles -- other people's power struggles, mostly.

Much of what we take for granted is just that: granted. It's not a personal achievement; it's an accident of birth.

 

[ChiTownScion]

I'd rather see the gents in a wedding party in well-fitting business attire of at least middling quality than ill-fitting cheap rental tuxedos.

You can actually pick up a decent (wool, not polyester) one online for purchase at a price less than a decent suit. A trip to a local tailor for adjustments, and purchase of the right shirt, tie, shoes, cufflinks & studs, and a cummerbund or vest, and you're set. The one tailored for you will always look better than anything you can get from a prom suit rental operation.

 

[tonyb]

You can actually pick up a decent (wool, not polyester) one online for purchase at a price less than a decent suit. A trip to a local tailor for adjustments, and purchase of the right shirt, tie, shoes, cufflinks & studs, and a cummerbund or vest, and you're set. The one tailored for you will always look better than anything you can get from a prom suit rental operation.

I happen to have a tuxedo -- a dark blue '40s-vintage double breasted job. I've actually worn it only once. When I'm dead and gone it'll pass on to someone else.

When my dewy-eyed bride and I tied the knot, at a local community clubhouse we rented for the occasion, we attired the four fellows in our wedding party in matching dark gray wool trousers and white shirts and silk ties from Nordstrom's flagship store in downtown Seattle, where a friend worked who saw to it that all necessary adjustments were made in the tailoring shop.

I figured that if I was gonna put these guys out to the extent of going to the store and getting measured, and then tie up most of a Saturday for the wedding itself, I'd rather leave them with something they might actually get some use out of.

 

[BlueTrain]

Most wedding rentals for the guys aren't things you'd ever wear anywhere else. The weddings my son was in were both daytime weddings and he wore a rented suit. I don't think he even owns a suit. I have two suits and wear them maybe three or four times a year.

As far as I know, I've never known anyone who was really rich, depending on how you define that. But my wife and I have known several people who belonged to the right clubs and were comfortably well-off, which could even define us, again depending on how you define that. Mostly they are "ordinary" people. But they're have worldly experiences that we haven't had and that even includes some close relatives. Aside from those who are related, one sometimes winds up doing something with people who are really out of your class but sometimes something clicks and the relationship continues but usually on limited terms and it's always on their terms. You might belong to the same church or something. Sometimes the coincidences seem to pile up.

I think I mentioned how I happened to spot an unusual British car parked on the street in about the same place several times. Well, I had one and so one day I stopped and started knocking on doors. I found the owner and he invited me in, even though they had company. It happened that we were both doing the same kind of folk dancing at the time, but in different groups (metropolitan area) and he used to belong to the same church I was attending, too. A few years later, I asked him to be the best man at our wedding and he accepted. We all wore highland day dress for the wedding.

 

[HudsonHawk]

When my dewy-eyed bride and I tied the knot, at a local community clubhouse we rented for the occasion, we attired the four fellows in our wedding party in matching dark gray wool trousers and white shirts and silk ties from Nordstrom's flagship store in downtown Seattle, where a friend worked who saw to it that all necessary adjustments were made in the tailoring shop.

I wore a plain solid black business suit at my wedding, but it was a very small outdoor affair. In August. In Texas. My wife was crying coming down the aisle, but I don't know if it was because she was overcome with joy or because she looked to the end of the line and it was me standing there.

 

[tonyb]

I wore a plain solid black business suit at my wedding, but it was a very small outdoor affair. In August. In Texas. My wife was crying coming down the aisle, but I don't know if it was because she was overcome with joy or because she looked to the end of the line and it was me standing there.

I treated myself to a new suit for my hanging. A gray off-the-rack Brooks Brothers getup. Boring but almost universally serviceable.

 

[ChiTownScion]

Well, I'd definitely prefer a suit to some of the ridiculous outfit that we wore in weddings or to proms in the 70's and 80's...

Note the guy with the wrist watch, cummerbund, tailcoat and yellow ruffled shirt: you hang round the FL long enough and there are certain modes of dress that become defined as mortal sin.

But I did go out and purchase a black DJ/ tux, mainly for lodge events, transatlantic crossings, and nights out on the town. (The crossings are still on the bucket list, but when the time comes I'm ready.) Buying a whole white tie/ full formal ensemble, complete with top hat and pumps, seems intriguing but highly impractical. Unless of course my current wife ditches me for a 20 year old pool boy, and I end up marrying a gal who insists upon moving to Vienna for the entire ball season.

 

[LizzieMaine]

The Third Doctor sees no cause for alarm.

 

[tonyb]

Well, I'd definitely prefer a suit to some of the ridiculous outfit that we wore in weddings or to proms in the 70's and 80's...
View attachment 66097

Note the guy with the wrist watch, cummerbund, tailcoat and yellow ruffled shirt: you hang round the FL long enough and there are certain modes of dress that become defined as mortal sin.

But I did go out and purchase a black DJ/ tux, mainly for lodge events, transatlantic crossings, and nights out on the town. (The crossings are still on the bucket list, but when the time comes I'm ready.) Buying a whole white tie/ full formal ensemble, complete with top hat and pumps, seems intriguing but highly impractical. Unless of course my current wife ditches me for a 20 year old pool boy, and I end up marrying a gal who insists upon moving to Vienna for the entire ball season.

For a second or two there I was wondering how you got your hands on photos from my eldest brother's first wedding, back in, like, 1974.

Seriously, these things had faux fur on the lapels. Just dreadful.

 

[Fading Fast]

For a second or two there I was wondering how you got your hands on photos from my eldest brother's first wedding, back in, like, 1974.

Seriously, these things had faux fur on the lapels. Just dreadful.

Something went dreadfully wrong style wise in the '70s with just about everything. If ever a decade should be allowed a do-over, it's that one.

 

[tonyb]

Something went dreadfully wrong style wise in the '70s with just about everything. If ever a decade should be allowed a do-over, it's that one.

Yeah. I like to think that there is always good style and bad style, no matter the fashions of the day, that there were bad dressers in the 1940s and there are bad dressers now. But then I think of just about everything produced in the 1970s and I have to reconsider. Some of the pop music was good, but most wasn't. Some good architecture went up then, but nowhere near as much bad. And the clothes? Oh man! What the hell were we thinking?

 

[Stearmen]

Something went dreadfully wrong style wise in the '70s with just about everything. If ever a decade should be allowed a do-over, it's that one.

At least men still wore suits and ties in the 70s! Now the 80s, sweat pants, spandex, leggings, ultra shorts for men, preppies, all that was formal wear. Hopefully, there will be no nostalgic return of the 80s!