Annie Oakley Comp Tickets

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name is Clark Moss calling from Spokane, Washington.

Hiya, Clark. What can we do for you?

Well, I’m curious. I work in the ticketing industry,

And we have one phrase in particular that is used for almost every event,

And that’s deadwood.

And what that means is tickets that are printed, let’s say, for use at the door,

To sell at the door, let’s say they print 100 tickets and 75 of those are sold,

Then you have 25 deadwood left over that you would subtract from that to know what your total is.

And I’m wondering, there’s another phrase for comp tickets, complimentary tickets,

Tickets that you might win over a radio station giveaway or something, used to be called Annie Oakley’s.

And from what I understand, that has to do with how Annie Oakley would do her tours.

And she’d come to town and she’d ask people to hold up a card, a playing card, and she’d shoot it out of their hand.

So the playing card would have a hole in it and she would tell them to bring that card to the show for free admission.

Real show woman there.

She literally punched their ticket.

So my question, I guess, is with Deadwood, I’m wondering if that comes from that same era or if there’s another meeting altogether.

Good question. Very good question.

It’s probably a coincidence that Annie Oakley has a term named for her and Deadwood appears as well.

These are both from like the settling the West gunfighter era, at least in my imagination, right?

But Annie Oakley is a legitimate etymology, right?

Yeah, she is. She lived from around 1830 to the 1890s, something like that.

The term deadwood has been used in a variety of industries and contexts since the early 1800s to refer to something that is unused or unneeded or is just holding a place.

For example, in typography, when you are setting type, they would put in wooden little placeholders where other characters were going to go later.

Say you were going to put a drop cap in later, you would put in a piece of wood in this big metal frame to hold the place, and that was called dead wood.

Like a blank scrabble tile.

Yeah, something like that.

And you’d also have dead wood when you’re clearing brush, or in forestry, dead wood is literally dead wood, stuff that’s completely useless and has to be cleared out.

So the earliest use that we know of this particular dead wood, referring to tickets, is from the 1890s.

I find it in a couple of different books, and one of them is really interesting.

It’s not quite the same thing, but it talks about these kind of bar room situations where you buy your drink ticket from one person,

And then you take the ticket to the bar and give it to the bartender, and he pours you a drink.

And what this does is stops the bartender from doing free pours, right?

And Deadwood would be if he took the ticket, instead of dropping it in, like, the register, the lockbox where he was supposed to keep it,

He would just, like, surreptitiously hand it to a friend who could then get another drink.

And so that was known as Deadwood as well.

And then just a few years later, deadwood referring to tickets pops up right away.

And it’s almost always in this concept of we’ve got a thousand seat house.

We sold 800.

We gave 100 away.

We’ve got 100 deadwood.

And it refers to paper because it’s paper made from wood, therefore deadwood.

Sure.

And that’s kind of where I figured it was from was some kind of reference to spoiled trees.

But it has nothing to do with the frontier town in the Badlands.

All right.

It has more to do with a bartender worth knowing.

There we go.

I like that.

Hey, thanks a lot for calling.

Thank you.

Appreciate it.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

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