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"A lady of the shoddyocracy of Des Moines found, on returning from a walk, some call cards on her table," observed the Harrisburg, Pa., Telegraph of June 30, 1870.
This from an NPR story, 12 Lost American Slangisms From The 1800s and the slangism is "shoddyocracy" but I'm more curious about "call cards". The difference is trivial in this case, but was that a term that meant what we call business cards or were these more the order of a While You Were Out form?
Nice story, by the way. I've run across Chicagoed and bottom fact in my reading, but I think I've heard "shinning around" and "tell a thumper" in the wild, so to speak; shinning around meant not only getting around quickly, but it implied taking ethical shortcuts as well.
In one episode of West Wing, a farmer asked Bartlett why he opposed a bill to support dairy farmers, and Bartlett said "you got rogered", saying that he thought babies' need for cheap milk was more important than higher income for farmers. Oxford dictionaries says roger, a verb for aggressive coitus, dates from the mid-16th century, but it doesn't say who to roger was named for. They date "Jolly Roger" from the early 18th century, and suggest that Roger may have been a euphemism for Satan. So maybe the other term suggests that Satan is a, ahem, a hell of an aggressive fucker.
An ngrams search shows "rogered" used in Copies of the depositions of the witnesses examined ín the cause of dívorce in 1771, at which time the fellow paid the woman one guinea. They find Jolly Roger earliest in 1714's Wit and Mirth: Or, Pills to Purge Melancholy ; Being a Collection of the...
The term chicagoed, on the other hand seems yo come from the July 23, 1870 game between the Chicago White Stockings and Mutuals of New York who won 9-0. Shutouts being uncommon at the time, the term "Chicagoed" may have been a sportswriters joke, as Chicago supposedly comes from the Algonquin word for skunk garlic. Except that the Cleveland Plain Dealer of May 4, 1860 had a headline “Chicago Chicagoed!” on a story claiming that a NY political convention for the Democrats outshone a GOP one in Chicago. Google's first cite for Chicagoed is Speeches and Addresses of the Late Hon. David S. Coddingto in 1866. The 1699 book A New Voyage Round the World, Volume 1 is returned as a cite, but I can't find Chicagoed in it. Chicago was only founded in 1833, but LaSalle mentioned it in his journal in 1679.
I have never heard specifically call card, but the term calling card is fairly common and from the context, it sounds like that's what it is. A calling card is similar to a business card but there is no commercial business connected with it. It is a card that one person gives to another as an invitation to make contact.
Some definitions include phone number as invitation to call. But that is a misinterpretation of the the word 'call' - it is the visitor who calls, meaning 'pay a visit.'
Lisa Randall in her new book has object as visitor:
An impact crater is the remarkable calling card that a speeding meteoroid that descended to Earth leaves in its wake.
Martha Barnette
Grant Barrett
Grant Barrett
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