Slang “To Bogart”

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hey there, Martha. Hey, Grant. This is Rebecca calling from San Diego.

Hi, Rebecca.

Hi, how are you doing?

Welcome to the show.

Thank you. Thank you. I’m so excited to be on your show.

Well, great. What would you like to talk with us about, Rebecca?

I have a question. I’d like to know the origins, the creation story for kind of a kooky word that I honestly don’t hear very often, but I use occasionally.

And here’s the scoop.

A few weeks ago, my boyfriend and I were hanging out at home, and I had made a couple of nice salads for dinner, and we’re both a big fan of blue cheese dressing.

And I hand him the dressing, and he begins to kind of layer his salad, and then he’s still layering.

And a few seconds later, I have to jump in and say, you know, dude, don’t Bogart the dressing.

Meaning?

Well, meaning, you know, hey, buddy, we’re sharing here. Don’t monopolize, you know, the dressing. Don’t hog it all up.

And he says, Bogart? You know, I haven’t heard that word from or since the 70s or something.

And I said, well, you know, I probably haven’t either, yet here we are.

That is not the story I thought you were going to tell.

You thought it was going to be a trip to Canada or Colorado?

I’m a huge music nerd, and I don’t know if you all are familiar with a southern rock band called Little Feet.

Sure.

Yeah, they kind of have that Louisiana, swamp, Cajun, southern rock style, and they were popular in the 70s, probably through the 90s.

And when I was much younger, I was listening to one of their albums that was literally titled Don’t Bogart That Joint.

It literally went something like, Don’t Bogart That Joint, my friend, pass it over again.

And then rinse and repeat.

So I just assumed that Bogart meant, you know, if you’re sharing something or an item, you know, one person can lose track and all of a sudden it’s gone.

Yeah, it’s definitely about hogging all of something.

And it has an interesting history.

Everyone who hears it immediately thinks of Humphrey Bogart, which is ding, ding, ding.

Me too.

The source of it, absolutely.

But it’s how it got to modern slang that’s interesting to me.

If you go back and watch Bogie’s old films, they’re fantastic.

They still hold up almost all of them.

But in a lot of them, he’s a tough guy.

And he bullies his way around.

He’s a mischief maker.

He’s a criminal.

That’s the characters that he plays.

And there’s violence, at least violence for the day, not the kind of violence that we put in film now.

And so a lot of the early uses of the verb to Bogart aren’t about hogging something. They’re about being violent, about forcing your way into a situation.

And then later they become about taking more than your share, often through violence, or confiscating something or stealing something in a violent way or in a very aggressive way.

And so it’s not just a lot of people say, oh, well, Bogie smokes cigars. It’s got something to do with cigars. But no, we have lots of contextual uses that aren’t about cigars. They’re not about smoking at all, cigarettes or anything like that. They’re about the violence of the characters that he played in the films.

And they pop up in the mid-1960s, and they’re fully a part of slang by the 1970s, and it’s fading a little bit today.

That’s so interesting. I thought it might be tied to the actor Humphrey Bogart, but I didn’t think that it was kind of introduced into pop culture until maybe the 70s or the 60s. I didn’t realize it was much older than that.

Yeah, well, the term itself doesn’t pop up until the 1960s, but the films that he was in predate that by some decades.

Yeah, and I always picture a cigarette dangling from his lips.

Right, a lot of people do.

There’s two interesting things here also worth sharing. One is it really took off.

The slang term really starts to populate the popular lexicon in 1969 with the film Easy Rider, where it’s used in the film between characters.

And that film was hugely popular, especially with the young people.

Another interesting fact is there’s a small number of people in this country who think that to bogart something, to bogart a joint or bogart a cigarette or a cigar, means to leave it too long on your lips, like to get too much saliva on it, to lip it a little bit.

And you can see Bogie in his films, sometimes the cigarette’s just dangling.

It’s like stuck through the mechanics of the wetness of the saliva and the lip and just not going anywhere.

And so we have these three main kind of slangy uses of tobogart.

One is about to be violent to get your way.

One is to hog something.

And one is to use too much moisture or saliva on a cigarette, cigar, or joint.

Or salad dressing on whatever you’re…

Exactly.

I’ve been down to get violent over Bob’s big boy, Blue Cheese.

Cool.

That is so interesting.

Thank you so much for taking my call and for what y’all do.

Thank you for calling, Rebecca.

We really appreciate it.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

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