Strike up the fedora.

Dear Word Detective: I ran into an old high school chum recently and was flattered when he said what he remembered from the old days was that I was always neatly dressed: “In fact, you always looked as though you had just stepped from a band box.” I think I knew what he meant but I wondered where that expression came from. I have heard it many times so I know he didn’t just make it up. — John D. Wilson.

Well, you’re ahead of me. I had never heard that expression before I received your question. Nevertheless, my mind, which tends to wander off if not watched closely, immediately concocted its own explanation. It seemed logical that the “band box” in question might be one of those gazebo-like park bandstands one sees in idealized Hollywood renditions of small town life in the 19th and early 20th century. Assuming those movies are accurate (which is, granted, akin to assuming that “King Kong” was a documentary), the bands performing in the “band box” were always neatly dressed in matching striped seersucker blazers and straw boater hats, making them a handy standard of neatness in dress.

Nice theory, isn’t it? Too bad it has nothing to do with the actual origin of “to look as if one came out of a bandbox,” which has meant “to appear very neat and fashionable” since the early 19th century.

The “bandbox” in the phrase is not a gazebo, but what today we would probably call a “hat box,” a thin-walled circular cardboard box used for the storage of delicate hats. The term “bandbox” itself actually dates back to the early 17th century, and the “band” in the word is neither a musical group nor the band often found on today’s hats. At that time, a standard article of fancy dress for both men and women was a “ruff” or elaborately ruffled collar (see here for pictures of ruffs), also called a “band” and often stiffly starched and up to a foot in diameter. The “bandbox” was invented to store these delicate “bands,” and later used, as fashion changed, to protect equally delicate hats, celluloid collars, and the like. Thus, to say that someone “looks as if he just stepped from a bandbox” means that he is dressed as if his clothes were fashionable and meticulously neat, and, by extension, that he is quite a dapper fellow.

It was the best of times, it was … KAPOW!

Dear Word Detective: Our seven year-old daughter asked me this morning “why cartoons are called ‘cartoons.’” I, of course, could not answer this question. We were wondering if you could solve our dilemma and answer that question for us. — John and Abigale Divozzo.

Oh, please. Rome wasn’t built by people who announced “I, of course, could not answer this question.” You’re her parents — make something up, perhaps a story involving automobiles and music. By the time she begins to suspect that you were, shall we say, being creative, she’ll be old enough to write to me herself, and together we’ll make fun of you. But seriously, ninety percent of my business comes from people misled by their parents, and it’s only fair that you hold up your end of the deal.

I’m actually a bit surprised that cartoons are still called “cartoons.” There are people, I have lately discovered, who personally resent, and are not shy about saying so, the venerable term “comic book.” Apparently once a comic book reaches a certain page count, it is now properly known as a “graphic novel.” I know this because our local Barnes & Noble recently ripped out an entire section of old-style novels (the kind with line after line of boring old type) and replaced them with “graphic novels.” Sic transit Madame Bovary. Presuming these things eventually end up on school reading lists (a fair bet), what do you suppose the Cliff’s Notes for them will look like?

Onward. There are two kinds of “cartoons,” of course: the static drawings found on editorial pages and in comic strips, and the moving kind (now often known, apparently inevitably, as “animated features”) shown on TV and in movie theaters. The moving kind of “cartoons” take their name from the static drawings, but the use of “cartoon” to mean a humorous or topical drawing published in a magazine or newspaper dates only to the mid-19th century.

Prior to that time, a “cartoon” was a preliminary sketch made on heavy paper by a serious artist, the word being derived from the Italian “cartone,” based in turn on the Latin “charta,” meaning “writing paper” (which also gave us our English words “chart,” “card” and “charter,” among others). Thus, in this sense, major artists of the stature of Leonardo da Vinci and Raphael (“But the sight best pleased me was the cartoons by Raphael, which are far beyond all the paintings I ever saw,” 1878) produced what are now some very valuable “cartoons.”