The Continental - Yep, a real thing. Not made up.

Our Diligent Readers over the age of ten may remember a reliably hilarious series of sketches from Saturday Night Live in the Nineties. They starred Christopher Walken as a romantically obsessed man of indeterminate non-American nationality in endless pursuit of an unnamed female protagonist with no dialogue, in the form of the camera operator. Very funny. They looked like this:



Few people know that the sketches were satirical creations referencing a series of radio and television broadcasts created by Renzo Cesana in the early Nineteen Fifties. The show seems to have been conceived as pandering to lonely women. He would talk to the camera and tell made-up stories of his supposedly romantic adventures with the viewer.

Walken as The Continental (The hilarious version), and Cesana as The Continental (Also the hilarious version).

Astute observers of pop culture schmaltz may remember a few tracks by Cesana appearing on the Ultra-Lounge albums here and there, during the lounge / exotica craze of The Nineties.

https://youtu.be/FHlKaPyi9Rk

Well, good news / bad news, depending on your viewpoint! Our sultry pal Renzo recorded a whole album of smokey love burbles, and you can enjoy / endure the whole thing on FaceTube! The More You Knowwwww... You're welome! Also, sorry not sorry!

Side A

Side B

Sshh! He's TRYING to SLEEP!

The Leyden Hootenanny

Sherman House - First in jazz?

Chicago's got some cool hotels, and Chicago had some cool hotels. This ad from the March 1969 issue of Esquire is for The Sherman House, apparently remodeling at the time. If the Sherman House was advertising in Esquire, it was either very groovy and hep, or desperately wanted to be perceived as such. So where was it, and where'd it go?

The address is strange. Three streets and no numbers. What gives? No, wait a second. That means the place occupied an entire city block, right in the middle of downtown. Jeez, that's big.

Randolph, Clark and LaSalle puts The Sherman House either on the site of city hall (not bloody likely), or right across the street from it, which is now the Thompson Center, also known as The State of Illinois Building! It's kind of famous, having been featured in a couple of movies, like Running Scared (1986). But the Thompson center was built in 1985. When was The Sherman House demolished?

Turns out WTTW has a nice page on The Sherman House, and it says the place was flattened in 1973. Yikes. Sounds like the 1969 remodel didn't really revive business.











Here's a picture of what seems to be the 1969 remodel (picture found at Forgotten Chicago). Very groovy! I approve.

But what happened between the demolition in '73 and the construction of The Thompson Center in '85? Forgotten Chicago has it:

After sitting vacant for the remainder of the decade, the Sherman House, along with this entire block, was demolished in the 1980s for the State of Illinois Center (now James R. Thompson Center), which opened in 1985.

Oof. Downtown Chicago is really nice, currently, but certain grandparents will tell you there were dark days for the downtown area, with vacant buildings and not-so-great places to see - or, if you were thinking more clearly - avoid, in The Seventies. It sounds like the Sherman House was one of those places contributing to the overall shabbiness of the downtown area. And it was right across from City Hall. Imagine a major city with a derelict hotel across the street. Great.

So, in 1985 they built the Thompson Center. Good deal. Here's what it looks like now:

ZZZ

That radiused glass corner of the building you're looking at? That's a ten-story glass atrium. From inside it's fairly amazing. If you're coming to Chicago, you might make an excuse to pop in and see it.

It seems I've been there, taking artsy pictures...

Here's a less artsy-fartsy and more descriptive picture of the atrium:

There's a link on the WTTW page for The Sherman House with a short video about The Sherman House. Apparently, The Sherman House was one of the first places in Chicago that a lot of people heard jazz music, was back in the early 1900's. Cab Calloway, Gene Krupa and Tommy Dorsey played there. It was also originally founded by the son of the Civil War General Sherman. Whoa. Their embeddable video code seems incompatible with Blogger, so you'll have to go look for yourself to see the clip.

But here's a clip from the climactic shootout scene in Running Scared, which was shot in the State of Illinois Building's atrium...



Anyway, The Sherman House still has something to offer to the ages: clip art! Here are the semi-concussed-Cheryl-Tiegs-looking lady and romantic couple images from this ad, all dressed up for you in their alpha channel backgrounds, ready to be used on your party invitations or divorce settlement documents. You're welcome!

Charlotte Corday and Marat

Click for kind of big.

Joke #1 - "Ooh, that's a lovely end to your book, honey! 'And they lived happily ever glaaaakkk!' It's upbeat, but still mysterious."

Joke #2 - "You know darling, this is what I love about our relationship. We can just sit together for hours without talking, and just be."

Joke #3 - "Darling, it's half past three. The Girondins will be here in a moment. I do hope you're nearly finished with that silly little 'suicide joke' you've been going on about."

Joke #4 - "Oh! There's that noise again. Is there perhaps someone at the door, or was it the undercooked clams I made for your dinner?"

Joke #5 - "Darling, it's half past three. My parents, sisters, and their nine children will be here in a moment. I do hope you've nearly finished with that sonnet you promised me you'd write about them. ...Darling?"

Joke #6 - "Darling, after your bath, please promise me you'll tidy up those books up on the shelf. One of these days they're going to fall while you're in the tub, and, well, I simply shudder to think."

Joke #7 - "Jean-Paul, my sisters will be here in a moment. I'm going down to put the kettle on. Do please get out of the bath, get un-killed, and please put on the blue waistcoat I laid out for you."

Mr. FancyBubblesNoPants_2, who could not stop if he wanted to, sent us Joke #8, which is a silent but deadly. - "Oh-em-gee! Will you quit doing that Cyril!?! You know I can't open this window!!....Or at least wait until I leave the room, dammit!"

[Commenter jokes will be added to the post.   -Mgmt.]

Henry the Eighth Woos Anne Boleyn with a Sweet Drum Solo

Shop Talk - Our Man in Space halftone pattern demonstration. And scrubs!

So, today the P.A.G! mail room was inundated with a flood of one email about the Our Man in Space post from yesterday. A guy called Jack wanted to know how to create the "moire" pattern we used on our replacement space background. It's a trick the Phil Are GO! Graphic Blandishment and Photoshoppery Brigade use all the time to make the fake magazine covers and stuff like that, so why not show all of you in the peanut gallery how to falsify some vintage documents of your own? Hooray for visual dishonesty!

For those of you not interested in the nuts and bolts of graphical chicanery, you may want to look at Slate or something just now. Also, Liar Town USA is pretty funny if the news is too depressing. See you tomorrow.

For those of you who stayed, here's jack's electro-letter:

Phil,
I was checking out the sci-fi book cover and noticed that you have chopped it into parts that we fellow designers can play with. I have to thank you for the “scrub” template – been trying to find a good one of those forever! My question is – how did you create the moiré pattern on the purple background? I have been attempting to recreate that pattern for a while now to no avail. Any info you can offer would be pretty darn amazing! And thanks again!
-Jack

Thanks for the kind words, Jack!

What Jack's talking about is this (see left). That grainy, screeny pattern?  That's called, in printing terms, a "halftone pattern". These are basically a way to simulate smooth gradients of tone with a limited selection of colored inks. 

If you ask Google about it, it will show you this:

History time!! Whee!!

But this idea is older than printed medium. If you think about it, this trick is basically what the impressionists were doing. You know that famous painting by Seurat? Yeah, that old thing. It's all dots, but when you step back, or squint your eyes, or just go slowly blind (as some impressionists were doing), it looks like smooth gradations of color.

Seurat used dots, but other impressionists used dabs of paint or short strokes. The point is, strategically selected (or "dithered") picture elements (later called "pixels"), can look like smooth color, even if you don't have an infinite selection of colors to paint with. Handy.

Printing generally uses four colors: Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black, or CMYK. Your desktop printer may have more ink tanks than that, but that's their problem. Offset printing like magazines and stuff use CMYK almost without exception. They way they get the appearance of every color in the world comes down to scattering tiny dots of those four colors in a very clever way that tricks your eyes into thinking you're seeing millions of colors. The better the printing machine, the smaller the dots. Ink dots these days can be freaky small.

Yeah. History. Great. So anyway...

Back to Our Man in Space and his ball.

Here's a closeup of the book cover. The original is on the left. The space background was so obstructed by text that it seemed simpler to just paint up something similar than to try and rub out all the letters in the original. So, that's on the right. We painted the replacement using Corel's Painter, because of its excellent variety of brushes with virtual hairs and things like that. For simulated painting, Painter is The Shit. But, lots of people paint in Photoshop, which is fine, because most people haven't heard of Painter.

Supergeeks may notice that the "painted bg" layer is a "smart object". Turning the background into a S.O. just allows you to keep all the filters and effects re-editable later on. It also give syou the option to easily fade on or off the opacity of the effect you create. If you do what we're going to do to a plain old layer of pixels, the effects are permanent, and if you want to change them, you'll be relying on your history palette or "undo" function. Right click the layer and "Convert to Smart Object".

First thing to simulate the halftone pattern is to select the layer you want to filter in the layers palette (in ours, it's the "painted bg" layer) and go to FILTER/PIXELATE/COLOR HALFTONE.

You'll then see this dialog box. If you want to go mad and become unemployable, feel free to mess with the different channels settings. But basically, the "max radius" is all you need.

This is one of Photoshop's filters that doesn't give you a preview of the effect, so you'll be doing some trial and error.

Also, the size of the dots in the generated halftone pattern are based on the size of pixels in your image. You can't make them smaller than 4 pixels. In my experience, the resulting dots are almost always bigger than you want. So, you may want to crank up the resolution of your image if for no other reason  than to force the halftone pattern filter to keep the damn dots under control.

Anyway, set the "max radius" to 4 px and hit the "this definitely won't be OK but I have no real choice" button.

There! Perfect!

Fuck.

Here's where that "fade off your effect" thing becomes important. 

Now that you've added some filters to your Smart Object's layer, they appear as "Smart Filters" on the "painted bg" layer in the layers palette. You can double click the "color halftone" thing, if, god help you, you want the dots even bigger. OR... you can double click the little sliders icon to the right of that and...

Fade off the color halftone pattern to something like 20%, so it looks roughly similar to the original book cover, and less like Froot Loops arranged by an OCD child.

"There! We did it! We're totally perfect!" No, you're not done. Sit back down.

Digital filters nearly always come out looking far too sharp. They tend to look more believable with a little blur smeared over the top. Second verse, same as the first. FILTER/BLUR/GAUSSIAN BLUR.

This time, you do get a preview window. In clear defiance of the laws of the universe, you can apparently blur something by a fraction of a pixel. In this case, 0.4 seems about the right amount of blur, but it's also clear that the halftone pattern filter looks a little too faded off. Click OK on the blur and have a look at the layers palette.

Remember the sliders icon on the right side of the "painted bg" layer? We can mess with that again and up the opacity of the halftone pattern from 20% to 25%

One more thing: The order in which the effects are layered in the layers palette matters too. For example, if you've added the blur, but it doesn't look like it did anything, make sure the blur effect layer isn't underneath the halftone pattern layer. The halftone pattern can easily hide the blur effect if it's on top. Drag them around in the layers palette to re-sort their order.

After that, the halftone pattern looks pretty okay. I doubt a perfect match is possible, given the peculiarities of whatever offset print pattern happened to be used on the book versus the filter in Photoshop. It's possible that somebody with a deep, borderline sexual understanding of printing techniques could manipulate those individual color channel options in the halftone pattern filter's dialog box could get it perfect. However, this is fairly decent. It should pass a casual "sniff test" for digital mimicry.

As our thanks to Jack for asking a good question, here are some more transparent "scrub" PNGs, pulled from ancient paperbacks and magazines. Do what you want with them, Jack, but if your deceptive image fakery gets you in trouble, I don't know you.

One is from that Dragonslayer paperback we posted a few months ago, and the other is probably from a nineteen thirty-something copy of Popular Science Weekly. You're welcome!

Click for 1600 px.

Click for 1600 px.

Four Roses and the Holy Hand Grenade

Hey Pointy Tree Day shoppers! There's only 255 shopping days left till Annual Seasonal Ordeal of Fake Merriment! Shop shop shop! Four Roses makes a fine Way Too Early For Christmas Gift to yourself!

Well, probably. I've never had the stuff, but if it showed up on the doorstep in a basket, wrapped in swaddling clothes, I would definitely adopt the hell out of it. Well, my belly would adopt the hell out of it... after the results came back from the lab, verifying that it hadn't been cut with Drano or, god forbid, Red Bull.

Whiskey is a - Hey, what the eff is that round doohickey in the picture? It looks like that thing in all the old paintings of royal fancy guys in leotards looking very nonchalant that their clothes are made out of curtains.

NOT King Charles. His Majesty Lord King Superfancy Tin Pants, the Fancy.

Yeah, that thing. Okay, they're not the same. The thing in the ad is probably some kind of old-timey  Pointy Tree Day ornament, made of cigar boxes and Jolly Ranchers. Note to self: have an intern make a note to use Jolly Ranchers as pretend gems on some kind of holiday festoonery this year.









Okay. So now, what the eff is the wind-up baseball in all the old royal paintings? Phil Are GO! research and Googling Squad... ACTIVATE! PKSHEEOW!

Apparently the pointless geegaw is The Sovereign's Orb, created in 1661 for the coronation of King Charles II (not pictured at left), and it cost the equivalent of 142 thousand pounds, or, translated into money, $207,438.57. Wowzers. I'm sure the British Kingdom was doing really well in 1661 and could totally afford a useless symbol like that.

Wait. It gets better. The Soveriegn's Orb's design is called a "globus cruciger", meaning "ball with cross stuck on it". It's is supposed to symbolize Christ's dominance over the world, held in the hand of an Earthly ruler. Fuck. You. Aah yes. The separation of Church and state: a crucial pillar of any civilized system of government... or, as the Church of England in 1661 and the American conservative movement of the year 2015 call it, "The blah de blah blah of blah de blah."

Religions and nations just love love luuuuuuv symbols. They're an excellent way to A) piss away massive amounts of money for nothing and/or B) create an excuse to commit indescribable crimes against humanity for nothing. This particular symbol calls for some right-on satirization, but please remain seated. Monty Python beat us to it, way back in 1975 in their movie about the Holy grail. Arthur and his knights find themselves at the mouth of the Cave of Caerbannog, and do battle with the Killer Rabbit of Caerbannog (natch). To defeat the rabbit, they bring out the Holy Hand Grenade, which looks exactly like the globus cruciger.

First, the scripture as read from the Book of Armaments, chapter 2, verses 9 to 21:

And Saint Attila raised the hand grenade up on high, saying, "O LORD, bless this Thy hand grenade that with it Thou mayest blow Thine enemies to tiny bits, in Thy mercy." And the LORD did grin and the people did feast upon the lambs and sloths and carp and anchovies and orangutans and breakfast cereals, and fruit bats and large chu.... And the LORD spake, saying, "First shalt thou take out the Holy Pin, then shalt thou count to three, no more, no less. Three shall be the number thou shalt count, and the number of the counting shall be three. Four shalt thou not count, neither count thou two, excepting that thou then proceed to three. Five is right out. Once the number three, being the third number, be reached, then lobbest thou thy Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch towards thy foe, who being naughty in My sight, shall snuff it.

Also, it shall be written that the chant "pie jesu domine, dona eis requiem" translates as "Oh Lord, let them rest." Thank you, the Pythons.

Halloween-ish viewing material - Yes, a little early.

It's cooling off in Chicago, and that means Halloween is on the way. Call me crazy, but when it gets to be Halloween, the perfect thing to get me in the mood is documentaries about life in historical England. Maybe it's because, for most people back then, the world was filled with superstition and crazy beliefs. Not like we're living in an age of enlightenment now or anything, but at least the Medievals had an excuse to life in ignorance, and hence, fear. For whatever reason docs about old England fascinate me, but especially so around Halloween.

You can find a lot of really good documentaries on the FaceTube... and I'm not talking about the (mostly) idiotic crap that History Channel runs. The last time I tried finding something to watch on History Channel, I swear I could feel myself getting dumber by the second. No, I mean good ones with actual historical facts and stuff.

Tony Robinson has had a long career in British TV, but lately he seems to focusing on making really interesting historical documentaries with a high educational value as well as entertainment. This is more or less a lost art in here America, but The Beeb is still producing excellent stuff.

It's not clear why, but The BBC doesn't seem to be bothered by the fact that there are full-length versions of their shows available to watch on the FaceTube. And, I don't mean the kind of thing where the program is chopped up into ten minute segments to get around the (now outdated) time limit on FaceTube videos. No, the complete show is up there, all in one chunk. So, here are a bunch of his shows that are really good Halloween-season watching. Don't tell anyone, but you'll probably learn something too.

If any of these links go dead for some reason, just do a search on the title of the show. Someone else will have the episodes up there.

The Worst Jobs in History. The series is broken down by eras. First episode is Anglo-Saxon. The second one is Medieval, and so on. Tony consults historians and always has a go himself at actually doing every job. What a trooper. In this scene, he's learning how to wash clothes by stomping them in a bucket of human urine, and he's not using pretend urine. Want to feel lucky? learn about some of the worst jobs in history. Twelve episodes.

Gods and Monsters. Each episode explores a topic of ancient superstition. The undead, witches, etc etc. At left, we see Tony dressed as an Average Tudor Bloke, finding his chicken mysteriously dead. The only logical conclusion? Witches! Five episodes.

Walking Through History, Fact or Fiction. Tony examines stories from history, separating out fact from legend. There is an episode all about William Wallace, whom you may remember from the wildly apocryphal Braveheart  movie. Guess what? The blue face paint (woad), and the kilts? Wallace lived 1000 years after they stopped putting woad on their faces and he was 400 years too early to ever wear a kilt.

Please enjoy!

Nicholson Files - A window into the future and past.

More interestingness from 1927 again, you bastards! Here's what they thought an airliner would look like.

Nicholson files are very much still in business. I have some in my shop, inherited from my dad. They're the best, pretty much. In this ad, Nicholson wants you to know that filing stuff won't be obsolete in The Future.

Yes, things will always need to be made smoother than they were before, and in whatever crazy future-world we wind up living in, Nicholson will be there to help you ensmoothen things. Shew. I was worried. "What of my jagged future-pieces, Nicholson?" I would shout. "Will you be there to help me de-burr, shape, and smoothen various objects in some unimaginable dystopian future when airships have umbrellas on them?" I would finish shouting.

Yes, the Nicholson File Co. of 1927 wanted us to be reassured of their continued file manufacture. And, to help you imagine such a crazy, smooth future, they've included a crystal ball vision of transatlantic flight. See?

Don't laugh too hard. if someone sat you down with some papyrus and a stick of charcoal and asked you to draw a teleportation device, you'd probably start with a phone booth and add some cones with rings around them. It would look about as goofy as this bird-fish-umbrella-mobile. A transatlantic flight HAD been successful as early as 1919, but the idea of commercial flights across the pond were still the stuff of dreams in '27. So, can we forgive the Nicholson File Co. for the goofiness of their silly drawing while simultaneously laughing at it? You bet.

Funny thing about files. I have one (possibly a Nicholson) that says "bastard" on it. So why's that? I had always suspected that it was related to the fact that there was a type of sword that was called a "bastard sword". I figured that files and swords are kind of similar. Maybe it was something to do with forging?

Wrong. The word "bastard" on it's own can mean "of abnormal or irregular size" (definition 7 in the link). This is how it came to mean "a child of irregular parentage". Back to files now. There are generally three grades of file coarseness. I say "generally" because you can geek out all day on files, but we're talking in generalities here. The three types are coarse, fine and an in-between one called a "bastard" cut. Here, "bastard" is used to describe the not-quite-rough-and-not-quite-smooth cut of the file. See?

As far as swords go, the usage is kind of similar. Swords are either long swords (like a knight would use - about 4 feet long) short swords (like a roman soldier would carry - about two feet long) and a neither-of-those lengths length, dun dun dunnnnnnn!... a "bastard sword". It just means "irregular" or "not like the others", or "not your typical length". It has nothing to do with what you shout at guys right before you hit them with it. There will be plenty of shouting and lots of swears in any sword battle, regardless of how long your sword is. Eventually, the term "bastard sword" came to be used for swords that were frikkin huge - like five feet long and twenty-five-ish pounds. Any guy running at you with one of those probably knows how you feel about him already. So, swearing was optional.

Click for big.

Trifles That Count in Radio

 Time for some hobby news from 1927, courtesy of Popular Science Monthly. Since computers weren't very good in '27, your average home nerdist was probably into radio. This article was meant to help you iron out the bugs in your "radio receiving equipment". Radios were complex, new(ish) and fiddly. You either had to have a hobbyist living in your house or a solid relationship with a local radio repair guy.

Of course, as far as in-home entertainment went, radio was The Shit. TV wasn't real yet and movies were only in movie theaters. So, you had better maintain your radio's various compnents and systems, like the lightning arrestor, condensor, A-batteries, B-batteries, and of course tubes. Radios had such tubes! They'd burn out after a couple thousand hours, and depending on how big your radio was, there could be quite a few tubes in there. You had to figure out which one was the problem (with a tube tester, of course), and take the tube down to the radio dealer (yes, those existed), and get an exact replacement.

It seems that, in 1927, radio was like the PC hobby is (or was?). If you were Into Computers, you'd choose your components carefully and snap them together in the coolest case you could find. This used to be a much more common hobby in The Nineties. There are still those who like to "roll their own" computer, but more and more people are just as likely to buy a complete machine and plug it in. And that's if they even bother with a computer at all. Most common computing stuff can be done on a tablet or smartyphone.

So what will be the geeky hobby in the future that we will shake our heads at? 3D printing springs to mind as a possibility. Right now, it's an expensive, complicated dalliance for the technically savvy. Someday, when everyone has a reliable, maintenance-free thing-o-mat on their desk, ready to print out a replacement part for your coffee maker or a new battery cover for their TV remote, will we laugh to think that, at one time, only the geekiest of the geeks were into 3D printing (or just "regular printing" as it will come to be known)? We'll see.

Anyway, let's marvel at the trouble people went through just to listen to some radio. But first: What may people have been tuning into, back in 1927? We didn't have any Gaga or Katy Perry fill our heads with their emptiness. What could they possibly have been listening to in '27?

• First coast-to-coast Rose Bowl Game broadcast.
• First opera (Faust) on a national radio network.
• First broadcast from Poland.
• Debut of NBC's "Blue Network".
• Debut of the Columbia Broadcast System.
• First Religious broadcast (in France).
• Canada's Diamond Jubilee celebration, the first nationwide Canadian broadcast.
• The formation of the FCC, which used to try to do good things, believe it or not.

Click on each page for an embiggened version, natch.

Arrow Ties - Some obsolete British slang to go with your obsolete tie.

Hey! You know how most of our slang comes from advertising? No? Correct! Nothing's squarer than an advertising executive trying to be cool, or - God help us - define coolness. Although they would dearly love to be the arbiters of cool, advertising can never be that. This perfectly innocent ad for Arrow ties is trying to get us to adopt some British slang from a previous century. Nice try.

If Arrow is to be believed, "wizard" and "pip-pip" mean "great" or "terrific". This is the first I'd ever heard of "wizard" being used as an adjective and "pip-pip", in my experience, has always been what an embarrassing Yankee says when he or she is trying to pull off a British accent of Dick Van Dyke-caliber, and failing to do so with a Dick Van Dyke level of cringeworthy lameness. Van Dyke was a perectly serviceable actor, but a vocal chameleon, he was not. To perform your own Dick Van Dyke-style British accent, just talk with a golf ball in your mouth.

I could find no evidence that "pip-pip" means "good". My actual paper copy of British English A to Zed has this to say about "pip" (and has no entry at all for "pip pip"... possibly because no British person ever actually used the phrase with sincerity.).

This makes sense with the dfinition I found at EffingPost.com: "Pip pip - Another out-dated expression meaning goodbye. Not used any more." The beeps or "pips" heard during a telephone call may have come to be used as a greeting or "goodbye". But this is my own conjecture based on some bits of information I found out, and should not be interpreted as historical fact.

I have heard "pip" used to describe a person, usually in cockney slang, as seen here at Merriam-Webster: "one extraordinary of its kind."

As for "wizard". This one seems like crazy talk. A quick Google search shows that it was used in the early scenes of the movie Juno:

FLASHBACK - Juno approaches a boy hidden by shadow. He's
sitting in an overstuffed chair. She slowly, clumsily lowers
herself onto his lap.
A 60's Brazilian track plays from a vintage record player.
WHISPERED VOICE Do you know how long I've wanted
this?
JUNO Yeah.
WHISPERED VOICE Wizard.

I found this prehistoric blorg post from 2007, where Melora Koepke was predicting that soon all The Kids would be using "wizard" instead of "cool".

be warned, "Wizard!" may well be everywhere, soon. Move over, Napoleon Dynamite imitators: Juno is about to transform the teenage idiom once and for all!

Yep! Nope. It didn't. I enjoyed the snappy dialogue in Juno, but I forgot the "wizard" thing. First I've heard of it. What's my copy of British English A to Zed got to say about "wizard"?

Hm! I guess it does mean what Arrow says it means. It's just not sweeping the nation like Melora Koepke thought. "Wizard" has had its chance to become a thing since World War One-ish, and it just hasn't happened. However, it does show you how deep Diablo Cody dug for improbably kooky things for her characters to say when writing the script for Juno. Honest to blog.

Much to the chagrin of Advertising, I'm sure, you know where a lot of our slang and euphemism comes from? The Bible, Shakespeare, and the military. A LOT of the entries in my British English book cite military as the source of unconventional Briticisms. You can find that interesting all you want, but I wouldn't go so far as to thank Hitler.

Click for big.