Drop a Dime on Someone

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Mark from Scranton.

Hi, Mark from Scranton. How are you?

I am good.

So I was watching a 70s crime drama, and I heard a character use the phrase, I dropped a dime on him. And I didn’t quite understand what they would have meant and why diming out somebody or dropping a dime on somebody would mean something.

What were you watching?

Was this like Columbo?

It was actually the Rockford Files.

Oh, I love that.

I love that.

I was going to say, thanks for the earworm. Living on the beach in a trailer.

Yes, and on the beach with the trailer was Angel was the character.

That’s right.

My idea of a rascal is James Garner in the Rockford Files. Great show.

Oh, yeah, so dropping a dime. Yeah, drop a dime for quite a while has been a term that means to become a snitch or become an informer. And it goes back to those old days when you’d make a call from a public telephone.

I always think it’s so weird now when I see a movie and somebody steps into a phone booth, you know, or on the Rockford Files or something like that. And they have to actually step into a phone booth and literally drop a dime in the slot in order to get a dial tone. And that became slang to tip off the police because that’s how you would do it.

And there are lots of variants of it, like drop the dime on or drop a dollar on or drop a quarter on, meaning to become an informer.

I was curious about whether you’ve heard it in terms of sports as well.

I have not, and I’m a big sports fan, but no, I’ve never heard it in terms of, I’m trying to think of where it would be used in a sporting analogy.

Think about a sweet pass in basketball that turns into an assist, you know, like an alley-oop pass that’s just perfect. Sometimes that’s called dropping a dime, or the same in football, dropping dimes down the field. You know, he just keeps connecting perfectly with the receiver.

So it’s a lovely extension of that.

Yeah, so you mentioned to dime, it’s a dime out. That goes back to the 1980s. Earlier, we have dime dropper, meaning an informer to the 1960s. And to drop a dime goes back to 1958, at least, when it appears in this supposed collection of teen gang slang that the police were putting together so you could identify teens in their evil language.

So the phrase never updated to account for inflation. We don’t drop quarters on people, do we?

Well, it did. Yeah, Martha mentioned dropping quarters occasionally. And literally, when we talk about dropping the dime, that was the mechanism of the machine. The weight of the dime caused things to happen. You needed the gravity to trigger the mechanism aside.

So you will see mentions of dropping a dime for the bus or for public toilets or for other things. Because that’s what those little boxes did. The weight had to hit the trigger or the switch inside to make the thing happen.

Yeah, and if you’ve heard that sound, you know it.

So I guess today it’s really not going to be around since it’s hard to even find a phone book. But I guess if you’re going to do that today, you’d get a burner phone, right? And just make your phone call and then get rid of it.

Yeah, exactly.

Or borrow one from some unwary passerby.

Right.

Mark, thank you so much for your call. Maybe I have to give Walkford Files a spin and see if it holds up. I remember watching after school and just thinking James Garner was the coolest. He was always in so much trouble, but he always seemed to pull it out by the end of the episode, didn’t he? Just in the nick of time.

It still holds up to today.

All right.

Well, that’s good news. Thank you so much. Take care of yourself.

Thank you.

Bye, Mark.

Bye-bye.

Take care.

It’s not quite the same, but drop a dime on your cell phone, 877-929-9673. Toll-free in the United States and Canada, or contact us by email, words@waywordradio.org.

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