Amid all the hand-wringing foofaraw around Mitt (Witt)
“Sh*t” Romney’s dissing of the lowlife freeloaders who want to mooch off the
hard-won gambling winnings of entities like Bain Capital and Sun Capital,
no-one has remarked upon the most famous “moocher” of them all: Minnie!
You can hear all about her here:
Live performance by the composer, Cab Calloway:
(Note:
The verses of the refrain, somewhat difficult of comprehension to
non-specialists, are in the Coptic language.)
With awesome Betty-Boop graphics:
(Warning!
If you have ever ingested mescaline, peyote, or LSD, do not watch this
video, or you may experience flashbacks.)
Pointless cover (which we link to only for its laugh-value)
by a couple of no-talent whiteboys (no, not Romney&Ryan, but almost as
bad):
(Best watched with the sound on “mute”).
Philological note:
From the lyrics:
“She was the roughest, toughest frail.”
Superficially, there would seem to be a contradiction. Here is the explanation:
Frail is here a
noun; it is 1930s slang meaning
‘young woman’. Perhaps
indeed in origin it derives from the metaphor of “the
weaker sex”; but if so, it very quickly lost that connotation, becoming a synonym
of the later slang nouns broad (which
does not conjure up images of women noted for their width), tomato (which does not evoke thoughts of
Italian cooking), or (the queen of them all), dame (related to madame, damsel and demoiselle). Mugs
and dames is a sort of further-downmarket equivalent of Guys and dolls. And if you don’t know
what a dame is (take it from me: there is nothing like one), then let
Murphy tell you:
Here’s a basic thumbnail of a frail, combining fragility
with femininity, from Jim Thompson’s classic noir of 1952, The Killer Inside
Me:
She wasn’t much over five feet and
a hundred pounds, and she looked a little scrawny around the neck and
ankles. But that was all
right. It was perfectly all right. The good Lord had known just where to
put that flesh where it would really
do some good.
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