Cindy in Virginia Beach, Virginia, is going through her mother’s diary from the 1930’s and finds the term high-hat used as a transitive verb. To high-hat someone means to act in a supercilious, condescending, affected manner, as if wearing a top hat or other tall, fancy hat. In a someone similar way today, the slang term to cap someone can mean to be boastful. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “To High-Hat Someone”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hello.
Hi, who’s this?
This is Cindy Meyer, and I live in Virginia Beach, Virginia.
Well, welcome to the show, Cindy. How can we help you?
Well, the words have to do with my mother, who grew up in Asbury Park, New Jersey. And she was a really social person, liked to do a lot of things. But she was given a five-year diary while she was in high school. And she wrote everything that went on. So to make a long story short, one of the entries says, Donnie asked me to a dance with him. I must have been crazy. I said no. He felt terrible, so did I the rest of the day. Tom asked me if I were trying to high hat him. Well, I’ve transcribed this, and I went by a million times, and I thought I’d look it up. So I found the dictionary meeting, but I had never heard that phrase and just wondered where that phrase came from. Trying to high hat him. Hat him. What’s your sense of that?
Well, what the definition is to snub or treat condescendingly, which seems kind of harsh when somebody’s just asking you to a dance and you say no. So I had never heard it and just curious about it.
Yeah, that’s the meaning I would use. There are softer forms of high hat just to give someone the cold shoulder or not give them the time of day or to refuse an invitation. It pops up in the early 1920s kind of all at once. There’s a suggestion in at least a couple of the dictionaries, the slang dictionaries, that it might have a theatrical connection. One of them says that it refers to in theater an affected, supercilious, or condescending person. But in any case, it comes up, and it comes from the idea that if you are hi-hatting someone, you might be acting like a person wearing a high hat, meaning a top hat, who might be snobby towards people that they considered inferior to them. So it’s really this calling out this difference that might be a class difference or might be an economic difference or something along those lines. And the time frame would have been 1936.
Yeah, that would be perfectly appropriate, yeah. And it’s very American. I don’t know that it ever made it across to the United Kingdom. But there are uses of it throughout the 1920s, 1930s. It kind of fades after World War II. And it still shows up in historical fiction in places where people try to resurrect old language.
Cindy, that must be a real treasure trove, a five-year diary. Did she write the whole time?
She wrote the whole time, and I’ve transcribed the whole thing. But what she did in a nutshell is like for the first day, you have like four lines. So she would cram everything into it, which made it hard reading. Later on, she realized that she could take a day’s activity and let it run for like a month or so, so it was easier to transcribe. So what I also did is I edited, I gave footnotes and added photos and just kind of jazzed it up a little. So it was pretty fascinating.
Well, that’s super cool. Thank you for sharing that family and treasure with us. And thanks for calling, Cindy. We really appreciate it.
Okay, thank you very much. Take care.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
You know what’s extraordinary? We talked earlier in this show about the slang that we picked up from the great kids at Lee High School in Huntsville, Alabama, right? One of the terms that I picked up was to cap someone, and it doesn’t mean to kill or to shoot. You talk about capping someone or high capping someone. Is this sounding familiar? You talk about being braggy, putting on airs, flossing as the old slang has it, or fronting as the old slang has it, or exaggerating about yourself, or bragging. You might say no cap, meaning no lie. And so all of these versions of high capping, high cap, two cap, cap, and again, it’s not the cap to shoot someone with a gun. They, I believe, are directly connected to hi-hat. Something you wear on your head.
Yeah, something you wear on your head that kind of shows off your personality and perhaps that you have money or that you have the right fashionable cap for the season, the one that everyone wants from the right team or the right hip-hop artist or that sort of thing. How cool is that?
Yeah, right? And just the echoes across the, that’s almost 100 years are amazing. From high school to high school.
Yeah, high hat in the 1920s to high capping or to capping in the 20-teens.
Oh, that’s wild.
Yeah.
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