The joke archaeologist, digging around in bygone postcards, has turned up several which might or might not be a little naughtier than they look. Some of them I can help with, while others have confused me. Take the simple example above. Caption and concept were popular in cards around the start of the last century: women in their proper sphere showing men who was the weaker sex. But, um, look at the face of the woman on the right and tell me whether this is going somewhere…no, wait until I’m older.
This is of the same era and is one of a series with the same caption: different cards covered drinking, kissing, and modern fashion. But other cards from other companies used the same caption, covering the same ground. I have seen people explain this as a salute to boozing and/or canoodling. The line, though, became a catch phrase (or meme, as the kids were saying ten years ago) because of a wildly popular dance of 1909. The full quote is “Everybody’s doing it! Doing what? Turkey Trot!” The turkey trot, an extremely athletic dance which required hopping, jumping and scissor kicking, upset conservative souls. The Saturday Evening Post’s parent company fired employees for doing the Turkey Trot on their lunch break (excuse me?) and even the Vatican felt called upon to denounce such immoral antics. The Turkey Trot (along with the equally scandalous Grizzly Bear) fell out of favor as the Fox Trot, a less exhausting maneuver, took its place.
Seriously, who got fired over this? My own example, shown here, went through the mail, so maybe not everybody…. But that is definitely a hand gesture which goes back millennia, was repopularized in the nineteenth century (pre-Victoria, so your Regency lords and ladies would have understood) and now, I find, is considered by commentators to be especially associated with the music industry. The lady herself seems unconcerned, and maybe it’s flattering that she thinks of THAT finger when she thinks of…or maybe not.
Do people still use cloves (or Clove Gum) to cover the alcohol odor on their breath, or have we found something different? And has anyone done a dissertation on all the foods used to cover the aroma of this or that on their breath? A minor thug in Farewell, My Lovely uses cardamom, and kids in The Music Man were accused of using Sen Sen (licorice-flavored). It might work best as a video, without some neutral observer doing the breath-sniffing to evaluate results.
Here I am all at sea. I have been unable to trace the origin of this phrase, which seems to have been very popular in the first decade of the twentieth century, at least on postcards, where it always involves the beach and/or swimwear. Walter Wellman has turned it into something surreal, and I’m not sure I‘ve followed him all the way. Is the lady on the right just a contrast to the mermaids? Is the gentleman underwater, who does not seem to be wearing any breathing apparatus, a suitor or a disapproving parent? And is that…but we’re supposed to be looking at the mermaids, not him, so I just don’t know what all is going on. You tell me.
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