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Trivia
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Dear Word Detective: I was recently re-reading one of Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe mysteries, “The League of Frightened Men,” and came across the expression “ritz me out,” which Archie Goodwin uses when he suspects that he’s about to get the bum’s rush. I see that you’ve covered “the bum’s rush” before, but I can’t find “ritz me out.” Can you help? — Ned Danieley.
To the nines.
Certainly. Seeing the word “ritz” immediately reminds of what is possibly my absolute favorite song of all time, “Puttin’ on the Ritz” by Irving Berlin. I’ll hear some version of this song on the radio and spend the next week with it running through my head, but (unlike when the song is something like “My Sharona”) it doesn’t bother me at all. The classic Fred Astaire version of “Puttin’ on the Ritz” from the 1946 film Blue Skies can been seen on YouTube, as can my second-favorite version, from Young Frankenstein. Incidentally, when I say I hear Puttin’ on the Ritz on the radio, I mean on the wonderful internet radio station Radio Dismuke, which plays only popular music from the 1920s and 30s.
That’s all relevant to your question because it indicates that when Irving Berlin wrote the song in 1929, “ritz” was already firmly established as a synonym for “fashionable style” and “finery.” “Ritz” is an eponym, a word that originated as a proper noun, often the name of a person. The person who put “ritz” in our language was Cesar Ritz (1850-1918), a Swiss-born hotelier who lent his own name to his luxurious hotels in London, Paris, New York and other great cities.
So fancy and exclusive were the Ritz hotels that by 1910 “Ritz” had become popular shorthand for a large and fancy abode, often used in a negative sense to describe accommodations that were anything but luxurious (“Lousy as the room was, I was damn’ glad to have it. … ‘It isn’t the Ritz,’ I said. ‘But we got nowhere else to go,'” 1960). “Ritz” also became an adjective, applied to anything that projected a sense of luxury and fashionable refinement (“Creating charming country house suites with prints, quilting, Roman blinds, pretty colours, real Ritz comfort.” Vogue, 1978). A few years later, “to put on the ritz” arrived as a popular phrase meaning both “to dress up in stylish and fancy clothes” and “to assume an air of superiority” (“If you mention some really worth while novel … they think you’re trying to put on the Ritz,” Ring Lardner, 1926).
That second sense of “put on the ritz,” by 1911, gave us “ritz” as a transitive verb meaning “to behave haughtily towards someone, to snub,” which is the sense you encountered in Rex Stout’s mystery. “Snubbing,” of course, can take a range of forms, from turning a cold shoulder at the punchbowl to, at the other end of the social scale, literally tossing the “snubbee” into the street, making “ritzing” the equivalent of the old “bum’s rush.” It sounds as if Archie Goodwin suspected he was about to receive something close to that rough treatment.
Interestingly, “ritz” as a verb was also used in one of the most famous detective novels ever written, Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep (“You sent for me. I don’t mind you ritzing me,” 1939). I don’t happen to have my copy handy, but my sense is that Chandler used it in the sense of “haughtily dismiss.”
Dear Word Detective: I looked up the word “fancy” in search and got plenty of uses of it but no etymology. Have you considered what a strange word it is? You can fancy something, or someone. You can wear fancy dress. You can be fancy-free. You can also eat tinned salmon (fancy) or tinned tuna (fancy); in fact various tinned things from grocers are described as “fancy.” Why? In addition, you may be a dog-lover, or a cat person, but if you keep homing-pigeons, you are a “pigeon fancier.” — Graham Chambers.
That’s a good question, but you left out the particular “fancy” that I would probably blurt out in free-association psychotherapy, which is “Fancy Feast,” a heavily-advertised premium “tinned” cat food here in the US. The true import of its name finally dawned on me just last year. Cats love Fancy Feast until they hate it, which they invariably begin to do after about the third can of a 24-can case. So it sits on the shelf while I cook cheeseburgers for the little nippers, and a week later we give it another shot, when it will, we hope, again strike their “fancy.”
The fox, goes a quotation usually ascribed to the Greek poet Archilocus, knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing. The one big thing to know about “fancy” in all its senses is that “fancy” is, etymologically, the same word as “fantasy,” simply in a shortened form (which was preceded by the transitional forms “fantsy” and “phant’sy” in the 15th and 16th centuries).
The root of “fantasy” was the Greek word “phantasia,” which meant “appearance, perception, imagination.” Filtered through Latin and Old French, “fantasy” first appeared in English in the 15th century with those same senses, and soon developed its modern meanings of “figment of the imagination,” “unsupported notion” and “daydream.” But “fantasy” also carried the meaning “whim, notion or desire,” and when the shortened form “fancy” began to be considered a separate word in the 16th century, it took on this sense of “whimsical notion” or “changeable mood,” an idea or preference of the moment rather than a matter of conviction. By the late 16th century, “fancy” had specifically come to mean “taste, preference in matters of art or appearance,” which led to “fancy” meaning “affection for or interest in.” As an adjective, “fancy” took on the meaning of “varied or enhanced according to fancy” (as opposed to “plain”), and thus anything gussied up with extra care, showy details or expensive materials was labeled “fancy.” Voila, “fancy tuna” and such concoctions as “Fancy Feast.”
As a verb, “fancy” followed the development of the noun, particularly in the sense of “to have a liking or affection for,” thus giving us “pigeon-fanciers,” et al. (There is, in fact, a magazine called “Cat Fancy” here in the US.) Early on, “fancy” was also used to mean “to fall in love with another person,” but today it has calmed down to meaning only “romantically interested in” (“Carlyle breakfasted with Moore … and fancied him,” 1838). Interestingly, the adjective “fancy-free” originally, in the 16th century, meant “free from amorous entanglements,” (reflecting that serious “love” use of “fancy”), but now it’s simply used to mean “carefree” (as in the phrase “footloose and fancy-free”).
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