Cracking Foxy

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Victor Fiorillo from Philadelphia.

Hey, Victor, welcome to the program.

What’s on your mind today?

Thank you so much.

Well, I love film noir movies. I think I’ve seen every single one, perhaps. And one of the things I love about film noir movies is just the language that is used. The dialogue is just so, so important. And when you watch these movies from the 1940s, you know, you hear you hear turns of phrase that you just don’t hear so much today.

A few years ago, I watched the Maltese Falcon starring Humphrey Bogart for probably the 30th time. And since the time before, I had started watching everything with closed captioning, which was a product of the show Peaky Blinders, because my wife and I had no idea what people were saying half the time, not because of hearing issues, just because the accent is so hard to understand. And I just started doing that with every movie. And it was kind of amazing to see, you know, watch The Godfather again with closed captioning. And you just see these things you never detected before that people are saying. So I definitely recommend it to movie lovers to give it a try.

And when I watch The Maltese Falcon, there’s this scene where the cops pay a visit to Humphrey Bogart, who’s a private detective and former cop. And he’s under suspicion for a murder. And he explains that he kind of apologizes to the cops for getting upset with them. And he explains why. And he says that, you know, he was upset. And then he says, you birds cracking foxy. You birds cracking foxy.

So first of all, he’s calling them birds, which is just kind of funny because we don’t really use that term in that way anymore. But Kraken Foxy, when I read it on the closed captioning, I was wondering if it was misspelled or something else. I started looking around, couldn’t find anything, did some archival newspaper searching on newspapers.com, thinking, well, this might be a term that was used back in the 40s. Found nothing at all except for a band from New Jersey that called itself Kraken Foxy in the 80s. So I turn to you because I have no idea where the phrase comes from.

So did you search for Kraken with the G or Kraken without the G?

I think I searched with an apostrophe because it sounded like he was saying Kraken Foxy. So the search tip for you is to always search for what they call in linguistics the inflected forms. So search for Kraken, search for Kraken, search for Kraken, E-D, and Kraken with the G, and you would find more. If you search for cracking with the G, you will find the 1930 version of the Maltese Falcon that was serialized in the newspapers.

Wow.

I didn’t know about that.

Yeah, that’s how it started out. It was serialized in pulp magazines and newspapers. Actually, far back is 1929. And then it was kind of edited up and then published as a book and then turned into a movie. And then, as a matter of fact, it is now in the public domain.

Amazing. I hope that we’ll see some new inspired works from it, where we’ll get some new amazing versions of it. It is particularly so well written that it is very good as an audio book or a detective drama with great voice actors, because it’s so dialogue rich in the original.

In any case, yeah, you have to break it down into two parts. The crack is the same crack as to crack a joke or to crack wise, meaning to make a snotty remark, and variations of that verb to crack, meaning some form of to say, go back hundreds of years. And then foxy. So English has a ton of meanings of foxy. But the one we want is the one that means to be cunning or clever, especially meaning to be cunning or clever in a devious or underhanded way. And that’s about 200 years old. So that’s to crack foxy. And it looks like to me that Dashiell Hammett coined it. It looks like Dashiell Hammett was the coiner of those two words together, crack and foxy, meaning to say something cleverly devious.

Amazing. I was trying to use context to figure out exactly what it meant, and you kind of understand sort of, but I just had no idea what the actual meaning was or where it came from. I do think I’m going to start incorporating it into my vocabulary just so people look at me funny and wonder what I just said. That’s a life goal.

If you want a good slang resource for this sign, if you love noir movies, the best slang resource for you is Green’s Dictionary of Slang. Just Google that. It’s free online. It’s by Jonathan Green, who is a respected slang lexicographer. It’s very good. It’s not Urban Dictionary. It’s way better than Urban Dictionary, even though it doesn’t touch on the modern stuff quite as deeply.

Well, Victor, thanks so much for calling and sharing that with us.

Thank you for the explanation. Love it. And I love the show.

All right. Thank you. Take care.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

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