March 9, 2007
That Persistent Buzz Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 11:40 AM EST The world’s laziest blogging technique is to post whatever idle thoughts pop into your head in reaction to whatever you happen to be reading or watching at the time. These days I’m the world’s laziest blogger, so that suits me fine. Anyway, the other day I was reading an S. J. Perelman piece from the early 1940s called “Button, Button, Who’s Got the Blend?,” in which a bakery magnate confronts his wastrel of a nephew. Perelman liked to salt his writing with slang terms, as can be seen in the magnate’s bitter complaint: “It’s a stench in the nostrils of the cup-cake trade—throwing away your guilders on fly chorus girls and driving your Stutz Bearcat in excess of sixty M.P.H.” That quote reminded me of a passage in my favorite O. Henry story, “The Moment of Victory,” which was first published in 1908. In it, a young man tries to impress a young woman and gets the age-old response: “‘Hello, Willie!’ says Myra. ‘What are you doing to yourself in the glass?’ “‘I’m trying to look fly,’ says Willie. “‘Well, you never could be fly,’ says Myra with her special laugh, which was the provokingest sound I ever heard except the rattle of an empty canteen against my saddle-horn.” So here we have a slang term that goes back to the days of Theodore Roosevelt, was still alive at mid-century, continued to flourish in the 1970s (with Superfly, for example), and, according to my extensive contacts in the hip-hop world, is still a favorite of rappers today (as in “Cause I’m so fly / Ya eyes don’t lie,” from “U Know What It Is,” by Young Jeezy, and I’ll bet that’s the first time Young Jeezy has ever been cited on the American Heritage Blog). I thought the earlier uses might have had some connection with aviation, which was just getting started in O. Henry’s day and still carried an image of glamour in Perelman’s. (The O. Henry story takes place on the eve of the Spanish-American War, in 1898, but it could have been a mild anachronism.) Perhaps they did, but according to Eric Partridge’s A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, “fly,” in the somewhat similar sense of “artful, knowing, shrewdly aware,” goes back to around 1810, with “U.S. fly dame, a harlot” dating at least to 1888. Of its derivation, Partridge writes: “Perhaps ex the difficulty of catching a fly [this would not explain the harlot — FS], more prob. cognate with fledge, fledged, as Sewel, 1766, indicates (W.); though Bee’s assertion that it is a corruption of fla, abbr. flash, is, considering the devices of c. [cant], not to be sneered at.” Wiping the nascent sneer off my face, I tried to think of another slang term that had accomplished the knife’s-edge feat of maintaining its rakish tone for a century without either falling into disuse or becoming mainstream. I couldn’t come up with anything, nor could I think of another example of white-to-black slang migration. It moves in the opposite direction all the time, of course, but how often does a term start out in the pages of Munsey’s and The New Yorker and end up being used as a mocking signifier of wannabe homeyness, as in the Offspring’s “Pretty Fly (For a White Guy)”? (Actually, that would make perfect sense for today’s New Yorker, but not for 60-odd years ago.) Leafing through a book of obsolete slang like Partridge’s can be as depressing as walking through a graveyard: page after page of words and phrases that once were young and fresh and lively and important to lots of people, and now are buried deep in the cold, cold ground. Yet somehow “fly” has managed to escape this fate. Although there are too many birds and bees and insects swarming around this entry already, I will venture to say that this virtually unprecedented achievement qualifies “fly” to be known as the cockroach of linguistics.
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