Tuesday, September 18, 2012

“Minnie the Moocher”


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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