La La Land

Filed Under July 2008, columns | Leave a Comment

Pittsburgh with palm trees.

Dear Word Detective:  Mike Royko did several humorous columns about southern California.  I recall one in which he felt that the USA was tilted so all the strange stuff ended up there.  He also coined the moniker “Governor Moonbeam” for Jerry Brown for proposing that California have its own space satellite.  Did he have anything to do with coining the phrase “La La Land”?  (Or is it “LA LA Land”?)  What is the origin of that useful phrase? — Maxwell M. Urata.

Good question, but I’ll have to be careful with my answer.  I might as well admit, right off the bat, that I’m a bit afraid of California.  For one thing, I can’t even type the word without hearing it as pronounced by Governator Ahnold (”cally-FOR-nee-ya”), which makes it sound like either an esoteric legal maneuver or a very unpleasant fungal disease.  I also can’t shake the memory of a science fiction story I read as a child in which California begins spreading eastward and farmers in Iowa suddenly start wearing sunglasses and reading Variety.  I guess that’s two votes for fungus.

There was a time when I wouldn’t have had to explain who Mike Royko was, but it’s probably a good idea to do so now, which is a real shame.  From 1959 until his death in 1997, Royko was the quintessential big city newspaper columnist, the city in this case being Chicago.  Mike Royko’s beat was the lives of working people and the world as viewed through their eyes, rendered with his own wit and fearlessly sharp tongue.  His characterization of then-Governor Jerry Brown as “Governor Moonbeam” in 1978 is perhaps his most famous creation, but Royko later said he regretted coining the term and considered it unfair to Brown.

“La-La Land,” by which is generally meant Los Angeles (although occasionally all of California), certainly has the ring of Royko, but it’s not one of his inventions.  The earliest appearance of the term (in reference to Los Angeles) so far found comes from 1979.  Interestingly, at about the same time, “la-la land” came into use as a slang phrase meaning “a state of dreamy disconnection from reality,” whether due to drunkenness or dementia.

The match of “la-la” to “LA” as an abbreviation for Los Angeles has certainly contributed to the popularity of “La-La Land.”  But “la-la” by itself has long been used to mean “to sing a song by substituting ‘la la’ for the words” (as a child or childlike adult might), which may have fed into the “demented” meaning of “la-la land.”

And while Los Angeles wears the “La-La” crown today, there is evidence that it was not the first winner.  Linguist Ben Zimmer, writing on the American Dialect Society mailing list two years ago, noted a headline from 1925 (in the Los Angeles Times, no less) in which Paris goes by the name “La-La Land.”  Evidently this “La-La” was drawn from the stereotypically French interjection “Ooh-la-la!” (meaning literally “Oh, there, there!”), a phrase popularized by American comedians and cartoons when France was considered the epicenter of all things risque.

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Dreck, Dreg

Filed Under July 2008, columns | Leave a Comment

Bottom of the barrel.

Dear Word Detective:  I would like to know if the words “drek” and “dreg” are derived from the same base word.  They mean similar things. — Melissa K.

Good question, and it reminded me of something I learned recently.  This will seem like a complete non sequitur, but bear with me.  From talking to someone who works there, I discovered that the Olive Garden (an “Italian cuisine” restaurant chain in the US), while it charges about nine bucks for a glass of decent wine, charges only twenty-five cents for a quarter-glass “sample” of that same wine, four samples maximum per customer.  It doesn’t make the foam-rubber bread sticks any more palatable, but for a buck a glass, it can’t hurt.

Now that all the winos are on their way to the mall, onward.   “Dreck” (which is how it’s now usually spelled) and “dreg” do share a common, shall we say, ambience.  Both connote things that are generally considered unpleasant, usually unwanted and almost always useless.  But aside from their resemblance, the two words are unrelated.

“Dreg,” while it does exist in the singular form, is almost always seen in the plural “dregs.”  In a literal sense, “dregs” are the the thick sediment that settles and accumulates in the bottom of a bottle (or a tanker truck on its way to the Olive Garden) of wine or other liquor.  Given that humanity has been hitting the sauce pretty much since forever, it’s not surprising that “dregs,” which appeared in English back in the 14th century, harks back to an ancient Old Norse word (”dregg”) meaning the same thing.  “Dregs” is most often encountered in its figurative sense of “the most worthless parts” (as in “the dregs of humanity”) or “the last traces” (”He sacrificed the last dregs of his self-respect by taking the job”).  Incidentally, “dregs of humanity” is considered a hoary cliche, but, then again, “hoary cliche” is a hoary cliche.

“Dreck” is in the same ballpark as “dregs,” but even less attractive. From the Yiddish “drek” (in turn from the German “dreck”), meaning “filth or dung,” “dreck” is generally used to mean “worthless trash, garbage,” most often in a figurative sense.  So a cheap knockoff of a Rolex watch might be dismissed as “dreck” or the season’s offerings in new TV shows summed up by critics as “dreck.”  The first appearance of “dreck” in English found so far occurs, interestingly, in James Joyce’s 1922 novel Ulysses, used as a personal insult (”Farewell. Fare thee well. Dreck!”), but such ad hominem use is not very common today.

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