At this year's Academy Awards extravaganza (rooted in the Latin extravagantem, "to wander beyond," with an Italian ending that lifts it into "spectacular entertainment"), a nominee in 11 categories is Martin Scorsese's The Aviator, about the eccentric aviation innovator and pioneering movie producer Howard Hughes. (If you're rich, you're "eccentric"; if you're poor, you're nuts.)
One scene in that film is fixed in my memory because it may feature an anachronism. The classic example of such a time warp of phraseology is in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, set in ancient times, in which Cassius says, "The clock hath stricken three." The Bard forgot that clocks that strike the hour had probably not been invented at the time. In The Aviator, a glittering party is held to celebrate the conclusion of the filming of Hughes' 1930 epic, Hell's Angels. What struck me was a large sign with red lettering: "Hell's Angels `It's a Wrap.'" The placement of the phrase within quotation marks suggests it was fresh at the time. But was it? Or did the director or screenwriter project a current phrase back in time?
Five years ago, Hendrick Hertzberg, the New Yorker writer, spotted an anachronism in a Woody Allen movie set in the 1930s: a musician says, "You know what I'm sayin?'" a locution that did not become popular until the '80s. (As Allen famously said, "80 percent of success is showing up" -- at the right time.)
During the '40s and '50s, the order to conclude a day's shooting of a movie scene was expressed as wrap it up, sometimes followed by "Print it." This was recorded in movies about movies: In Vincente Minnelli's 1952 film, The Bad and the Beautiful, a cost-conscious studio executive played by Walter Pidgeon complains to a producer, Kirk Douglas, about "700 extras in 19 buses, and a crew of 85. ... they've been up in the mountains for two days already -- eating their heads off!" When Douglas looks at his watch and says, "We'll try it again in the morning," Pidgeon says hopelessly to the director, "Wrap it up for tonight."
When did wrap up (or wrapping up, first cited in the sense of "finishing," in a 1926 book by T.E. Lawrence, best known as Lawrence of Arabia) turn the verb into a noun, as in "That's a wrap?" The OED's first citation is from a 1974 cinematographic novel by Michael Ayrton: "Other cars are heard starting up out of shot and the lights on the pergola go off so I assume it's a wrap and the crew is listening to the director saying something consequential and busy about tomorrow's call."
However, assiduous research turns up this 1957 entry in Charlton Heston's journal, quoted in the 1998 edition of This Is Orson Welles, by Welles and Peter Bogdanovich: "We rehearsed all day. ... the studio brass gathering in the shadows in anxious little knots. By the time we began filming at 5:45, I knew they'd written off the whole day. At 7:40, Orson said: `OK, print. That's a wrap on this set.'"
Thus, it appears that the switch from wrap it up to that's a wrap took place in the '50s. That seems to make its use in The Aviator about a party in 1930 an anachronism (from the Greek ana, "back," and chronos, "time").
How does one get this evidence? Went to Amazon.com; searched for autobiographies of film directors like John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles; hit the "search inside the book" feature for wrap and up came the Heston usage in Welles' book. The wordhounds and phrasedicks of the American Dialect Society's listserv may now find an earlier citation to cast doubt on my conclusion; that's the fun in this etymological dodge.
A more profound question: Is the game of digging out this basis for nit-picking film criticism at Oscar time worth the candle?
Of course this game of dialect archaeology is worth the candle. Whatever piques our curiosity and holds our interest -- useful or not -- has cultural or intellectual value. Never sneer at the still, small voice within you that breathes, "So that's where it comes from!" Words are tools to be examined for their provenance and honed to meet expression's present needs; if meaning-mining loses its attraction, then what's a metaphor? And the more we poke around in the language, trying the doors, the more avenues are opened for exploration.
OF GAMES AND CANDLES
The game is not worth the candle, the man says. That expression, which gets 900 Google hits, is widely understood to mean "so unimportant that any time or effort spent on it would be wasted." But who knows what game? Whose candle? We grasp the meaning without reaching for the resonance. The word picture was first drawn by the French essayist Michel de Montaigne in 1580: Le jeu ne vaut pas la chandelle. Now here's his metaphoric source, found in the American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms and then, through Bartleby.com, in E. Cobham Brewer's 1898 Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. Those who wanted to gamble at night had to play by candlelight. If the stakes were insignificant, it would not be worth the cost of the candle that enabled the gamblers to see the cards or dice. Only when the stakes were high enough was the game worth the candle
Those of us living in the Light Ages don't really need to know that. But isn't our vocabulary slightly richer now that we do? All too often we lurch through our lives, metaphorically wise and etymologically ignorant, using tropes like dopes, seldom lifting the lid of our daily discourse to examine the history within.
To display my with-it-ness, I recently used morph as a verb to mean "change into." This transgression elicited a note from Jacques Barzun, the great Columbia University usagist whose presence now adds tone to San Antonio. "As for morph, from metamorphosis, it's the meta and not the morph that means `change.' The morph means `shape,' so the new usage is another blunder enshrined as an acceptable novelty. There are too many, and although we can't stop this one, we can do what the philosopher Quine of Harvard said, and that's `drag our feet.'"
Though disabled at 97, Barzun adds, "My body does not prevent my mind from working," which is also why he is an inspiration to a legion of lexicographers.
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