The larger scheme suggests the assignment of this meaning to eighty-six may be arbitrary. The only issue with this explanation is the existence of a more comprehensive numbering scheme, as evidenced by Winchell’s column. The most plausible is that it is rhyming slang for nix. Various explanations have been put forward for the term. McLaughlin will ask his fellows to play no more Jeffries platters, and has had it indicated by organization sparkers, Bill Anson and Peter Potter that they’ll press the measure at regular meeting tonight. He failed to show as promised to substitute for Bob McLaughlin, ill, on pilot’s daily show over KLAC, here. A “red ball” is an orangeade.īy 1947 it had become a verb, as can be seen by this item in the 5 February 1947 issue of Variety, which also shows the term had moved beyond the food service industry:ĭisk jockeys test their weight tonight when vocalist, Herb Jeffries, is named initial candidate for jockey’s nix list. “Thirteen” means one of the big bosses is drifting around. “Shoot one in the red!” means a cherry coke. “Shoot one” and Draw one” is one coke and one coffee. The first recorded, clear use of the current slang sense is in a Walter Winchell newspaper column from :Ī Hollywood soda-jerker forwards this glossary of soda-fountain lingo out there. Waiter.If you need any Scotch or gin, sir-.My number is Eighty Six. George Manker Watters and Arthur Hopkins’s 1927 play Burlesque contains an exchange where a waiter uses eighty-six, but it seems to be in the opposite sense, that of being able to supply something in short supply, in this case liquor in the days of Prohibition: The term appears in the late 1920s or early 1930s in the United States. There are number of explanations floating about, but only two are plausible: that it is rhyming slang or that it is simply an arbitrary assignment of a number in a larger numbering scheme. Why the number eighty-six was chosen is not known. It has passed into general slang to mean to cancel something or someone. It soon also came to mean to eject or not serve a customer. Eighty-six or 86 originated in restaurant slang with the meaning that an item was out of stock.
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