The Dating Game, Perfect Edition

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Lexicon Valley Podcast

0:52From Booksmart Studios, this is Lexicon Valley, a podcast about language. I'm Mike Volo with Bob Garfield, and today we're going to play a game. Here's how it works. I will give you, Bob, four words, each of which can follow the word perfect to make a common phrase. So, for example, if I were to say pitch, that would mean the phrase is perfect pitch. I'll give you four such words, pitch is not one of them, in alphabetical order.

1:25Your job is to put the phrases in chronological order according to when they first appear, as far as we know, in the written record. Is this one of those things where, if I get it wrong, I get an electroshock, and what we ascertain at the end of it is that you're just perfectly willing to give me electroshock? A psychological experiment. Yes, this episode is sponsored by Yale University. All right. So, after you put them in what you think is a chronological order, you can, if you wish, put an approximate year or decade next to each one.

2:03That's a little bit harder, but go for it.

Perfect Phrases Game

2:05Yeah, a little bit harder. Before we proceed with my failure, and it will be one, I think we should probably point out that this is a bonus episode attached to our previous episode about the word perfect. That's right. You have your pencil and paper ready? I do. All right. Here are the words. Crime, fit, F as in Frank, I-T, storm, and stranger. Put perfect before each of those words and arrange the expressions from earliest to latest, and let's hear your thought process as you work this through, mostly so that it doesn't sound like we're playing that John Cage piece with several minutes of silence.

2:48But also, it would be interesting to hear your reasoning. Hmm. Okay. Uh, well, I, I'm going to say that the first of those to appear in print is Stranger, perfect Stranger, which sounds to me like it could be 18th century English novel material. Okay. Then, I will say that next is Crime, again, for its appearance in popular culture, which I suspect may be kind of an 18th century thing, but who knows, maybe earlier, maybe it could go back to Shakespeare, but that's what could be my guess.

3:33Perfect fit almost certainly isn't the last, because I think it's probably more likely that that was used only in the era of ready-to-wear clothing. Before that, everything was bespoke and almost, by definition, a perfect fit, because it was tailored. Mm-hmm. Okay. And then Storm, I'll say it was fourth, because I had never heard the phrase before Sebastian Younger's probably 1990 book about a Nor'easter or some squall that kicked up on the North Atlantic coast and imperiled a ship.

4:12Yeah. Made into a movie with George Clooney. Made into a movie. Yeah. So, Stranger, Crime, Fit, Storm. One, two, three, four. All right. Let's see how you did. We'll start with the one that stretches furthest back in time. You were right, Bob. It's Perfect Stranger. It's a little earlier, I think, than you thought. Perfect Stranger dates back to at least the very early 1600s. That's when the play Sir Giles Goosecap was published.

4:44It's a comedy, which seems obvious by the title. We don't know for sure who wrote it, but it's thought to be a man named George Chapman, who was a contemporary, less known to us, of Shakespeare and Ben Johnson and Christopher Marlowe. And at one point in the play, the character Captain Fowlweather is comparing the inscrutability, the abstruseness of English women in particular to Latin grammar.

5:16Obvious comparison, right? Duh. And of course, as you know, I'm a huge George Chapman fan, so that probably helped. Right. So Latin is infamous for having very optional word order. The subject could be at the end of the sentence and the verb at the beginning. It's really up to the speaker. I know from having taken Latin in high school that it's part of what makes it a great language for poetry and for oratory, but it can make it hard to diagram the sentence, to parse, right?

5:51So this character, Captain Fowlweather, is suggesting that when it comes to love, an English woman's actions and her feelings are not necessarily in sync. They can be far apart. Just like the noun and the adjective in a Latin sentence or the verb and the adverb, they can, quote, stand as far asunder as if they were perfect strangers one to another. In other words, English women are, they're hard to figure out. I think you can remove English from that sentence and it would still scan, but maybe that's just the patriarchy talking.

6:28Well, the character, I know because I got into the play a little bit and I started reading it, the character, Captain Fowlweather, is an extreme Francophile. So he's comparing English women to French women in this case. They were so straightforward and logical. Yes, of course. Right. So Sir Giles Goosecap was published in 1606, which makes Perfect Stranger the earliest of these four phrases by quite a bit.

7:00More than two centuries, in fact. All right. So good for you, Bob. Expedia and Visit Scotland invite you to come step into centuries of history that await in Scotland. Castles steeped in legend walk along cobblestone streets. Come share the warmth of stories passed down through generations. This is a place with a past that is fully present today and all yours to explore. Plan your Scottish escape today at expedia.com slash visit Scotland.

Historical Phrase Examples

7:33The next phrase can be found in a classified ad in the Times of London from June of 1840. We've skipped ahead now. As I said, 200 plus years, I'll read to you from the start of the advertisement and see if you can guess which phrase it is before I even get to it. All right. I think you will. All right. The ad begins, actually, I forgot about this. It begins, ladies, children, and invalids.

8:07Yeah. I used to use that on the speaking circuit, and I got a lot of quizzical looks from the audience. You know, if there's one thing you learn from combing through old newspapers and periodicals, it's that, man, times have changed, right? Okay.

8:24Ladies, children, and invalids, Visterin and company submit for inspection their very superior French corsets, so generally esteemed for their... Perfect fit. Perfect fit. Which, I guess, is something those English women sometimes throw. Sometimes throw. Oh, it took me a while, but I got that. Perfect fit at moderate charges. Well, I had the time period, right? Yeah, you did. So, 1840, and just to explain the ad a little bit, they say that their stays and their braces are, quote,

9:01scientifically constructed for growing ladies and children, and as far as the other group they're appealing to, the invalids, they claim that their products are good for, quote, corpulence and abdominal debility, and they offer, quote, relief, support, and cure of spinal curvatures and deviations of the shoulders and chest. So, you know, I did a little digging into the Visterins. John and Henry were at least a couple of them. This was a family business of corset makers for decades, as far as I can gather, in the early 1800s, and they may have been the first to use that phrase, perfect fit.

9:42Well, I stand corrected, as I suspect I will be standing again very, very shortly. You may be surprised. In the early 1900s, there was serialized fiction that ran in a section of the Chicago Tribune called The Workers' Magazine. As the title suggests, it was kind of geared to the proletariat, to the working man. This recurring feature was about the ongoing adventures of this supposed world-renowned chemist named Ignatius Black,

10:15who wasn't only a scientist, he was also a con man who stole from, quote, bloated capitalists, as he put it. If you are a bloated capitalist, may I suggest obtaining a Visterin corset from a hundred years previous? Yeah, that'll cinch in the bloatedness. Okay, so in one of these installments, Ignatius is in his laboratory with a friend who is trying to talk him out of this other life he has as a thief.

10:46But Ignatius Black is dismissive of the friend's concerns because he's a genius. He's too smart to get caught. His goal, he says, is always, quote, to perform the perfect crime, to leave absolutely no means by which my guilt, rather my identity, may be discovered. He's kind of a cross, I would say, Ignatius Black between Robin Hood and Moriarty. Yeah. Moriarty, I think, was supposed to be a genius mathematician in this case.

11:17And Sherlock Holmes' nemesis. Right. And in this case, Ignatius Black is a chemist. But I would say that Ignatius Black may be the first person, fictional though he is, to formulate that expression, the perfect crime. The credit, of course, for possibly coining that phrase goes to the author of this and many of the Ignatius Black pieces that ran in the Chicago Tribune and the Minneapolis Tribune. His name was Lee McQuaddy. That leaves perfect storm.

11:47This one is a bit of a curveball because there is the perfect storm that is a literal meteorological event, right? Mm-hmm. And then there's the more figurative perfect storm that is not weather-related at all. It's simply the... Convergence of factors to create an outcome that otherwise would not have manifested. Right. And presumably a bad outcome. The actual perfect storm naturally came first. In March of 1936, there were back-to-back heavy rains in New England, resulting in severe flooding across multiple states.

12:25There's a Wikipedia page about this called 1936 Northeastern United States Flood. There's a page on the website of the National Weather Service about it. This was a big deal. A weather station in New Hampshire recorded seven inches of rain over a three-day period just before mid-March, and then a week later, another 10 inches of rain over two days. And this was on the heels of a very snowy winter, so the ground was already saturated. Between 150 and 200 people died.

12:58There was the equivalent of billions of dollars in damage. On March 20th, the Associated Press quoted someone from the Federal Weather Bureau named W.P. Day, who said that this was, quote, the perfect storm of its type. The Associated Press piece then listed the seven factors that conspired to make this so catastrophic, but the credit here goes, I think, to W.P. Day in 1936 for possibly coining that phrase.

13:29Well, I think you should also possibly consider crediting Captain Fowlweather from an earlier question.

13:37So it is 20th century, about 50 years before the marine storm that Sebastian Junger was talking about, but pretty recent in the overall scheme of things for the popular lexicon. Yeah, Bob, you are surprisingly good at this game. So it wasn't until the late 1990s that we get our first good example of perfect storm unrelated to the weather. This was a piece in The Economist magazine in 1998 about two Nobel Prize winners in economics who were founding partners of a hedge fund that had recently collapsed.

14:17People were like, oh, maybe you're not so smart after all. So The Economist, which famously has never had bylines until literally just last month when they changed that policy. So we don't know who wrote this piece, but whoever it was said that the, quote, consensus view is that at worst, the two Nobel winners were guilty of hubris. At best, they were the victims of a perfect storm in the markets. Several extremely unusual events took place at once with consequences that could not reasonably have been foreseen and are unlikely ever to be repeated.

14:57What I love about that example is that immediately after invoking the phrase perfect storm, the piece gives a perfect definition of it. Absolutely spot on. But where was it relative to Younger's book? Let's see. Perfect storm. Younger. That came out in 1991. Okay. So you're right. It is a splendid definition for the phenomenon that they're describing. But I'm going to co-bullshit because I cannot believe that a full six years elapsed from the time that book was published to the time perfect storm was used to describe all sorts of converging phenomena leading to a bad outcome.

15:43I cannot believe it's possible. I know, I know to a moral certainty, it immediately leapt into common parlance. Find an example. Phil, please do. I have laundry to do. I got things kind of stacked up. But maybe, you know what, maybe I'll just take you up on that.

Perfect Game in Baseball

16:05Okay. I do have one more bonus phrase for you, Bob, which I suspect you'll be able to date fairly accurately within about 10 or 20 years, I would guess. And that is perfect game. Hmm. Well, yeah, give me 20 years. You're right. And I will be able to tell you.

16:27Well, perfect game is a baseball phenomenon. That's where the pitcher retires all 27 batters he faces. Nobody gets a walk. Nobody is hit by a pitch and awarded first base. Nobody gets a base hit. And they're very rare. I think there's only been something like 36 of them in all of the... There have been 24 of them. It's even more rare than you think. Ah. And, you know, I guess it's somewhere around the 1890s.

16:58Yeah. I'm going to guess it's somewhere around the 1890s. You're within 10 years, let's say. Okay. This one has some fantastic irony built into it. On June 4th, 1907, a minor league baseball team called the Atlanta Crackers. That was their name. That's just lovely. They played a game against the Little Rock Travelers, Little Rock, Arkansas. Rube Zeller was pitching for the Crackers and threw a full nine-inning no-hitter, which is, of course, very impressive.

17:30The Atlanta Constitution, the newspaper, made it even more impressive because the very next day, the sports page wrote that, quote, Rube pitched a perfect game with the exception of a walk or so.

17:46Now, if you know anything about baseball and you've already stipulated this, in order to be considered a perfect game, you can't walk anyone, right? He was a great humanitarian except for, like, three murders. Not only did Zeller walk someone, but in the very first inning, he hit a batter with a pitch and then walked two others to load the bases. A sacrifice fly drove in a run. So it may have been a no-hitter, but it was far from a perfect game. In the newspaper's defense, the term perfect game as we know it today was not a thing yet

18:21in 1907. It wasn't a defined concept. Nevertheless, the Atlanta Constitution used it for the first time, as far as we know, in a baseball context. Now, what's even more ironic is that three years prior, in May of 1904, Cy Young pitched what is considered to be the first actual perfect game of the modern baseball era. Technically, there were two perfect games in the late 1800s, but baseball was so different

18:52back then. I don't personally think we should count those. A lot of people agree. Pitchers were not allowed to pitch overhand. The mound was only 45 feet from home plate, not 60. It took, I believe, eight balls to walk a batter. Just not the same game at all. But when Cy Young pitched that fateful game for the Boston Americans in 1904 against the Philadelphia Athletics, by the way, the rules had become more or less what we know them to be today.

19:22So his perfect game really stands out as the first of its kind. However, no newspaper referred to it as that because, again, it wasn't yet a term that people used. There's a great book called 27 Men Out, Baseball's Perfect Games. It's by Michael Coffey. I use this to gather some of the information for this episode. He points out that the headline the next day in the Boston Daily Globe was, quote, Athletics lose in unique game.

19:55Oh, so close. Yeah, that just didn't catch on.

20:02You know, that's so close, and this is a complete digression, but it reminds me, once I was about, in New York, at about, let's say, 57th Street and 9th Avenue, and a couple of tourists stopped me, and they said, do you know the way to Carnegie Hall? Oh, gosh. And I was like, ah!

20:26Could you rephrase the question? Oh, almost had the opportunity of a lifetime. Practice, practice, practice. So, Coffey also points out in his book that the New York Times wrote that nobody on Philadelphia scored a run, nobody got a hit, nobody reached base, but they didn't use the phrase perfect game. So, here we have an actual perfect game in 1904 for which the phrase is not used, and then three years later, a decidedly imperfect game for which the phrase is used, again, for the

20:58first time. Now, the second time the phrase was used was later that same month, June of 1907, in the Chicago Tribune, which posed the question, what is a perfect game? It answers the question in part by saying, a perfectly pitched game would be where no one reached first base. And that's pretty much the way we would define it today. No hits, no walks, no errors, no batters hit by a pitch, as you said.

21:28No one magically teleports to first base. 27 batters come up, 27 batters go down. That's only been done 22 times over the past 125 years in the modern era of baseball, 24 if you count the 1800s. Now, I should point out that there is kind of a philosophical question, a kind of conundrum about an even more perfect game, which would be, which would be more impressive to have 27 pitches and 27 outs, or 81 pitches, all strikes, so the entire opposing team strikes

22:08out in all of its at-bats. As opposed to getting a fly out or a pop out or a ground out. Now, it seems to be a conundrum, but it isn't really, because it really is impossible to have 27 pitches and 27 outs, because the 27th batter would come up and he would take a pitch, right? For ball or strike, either way, he's not going to let them fall into such an ignominious state. So if we're talking true perfection, I think the 81 pitches and 81 strikes really trumps

22:40everything else. I think I agree. Yeah, 27 strikeouts would be amazing. Now, you know, I was a pitcher for my Little League team, the Knights of Pythias, and I threw a perfect game, but it was more of the Rube Zeller kind than the Cy Young variety. There were a few walks, a few hits maybe, but it was perfect. Then may it ever live as such in your fondest memories. Lexicon Valley is produced by Livia Bloom Ingram, who wishes she were among the 0.01% of the population

23:14that has perfect pitch. When is that from, Bob? Oh my gosh.

23:2216th century? Oh, you were doing so well up until this point. 1925 is when we first see that in a concert review from a British newspaper, which says that the singers, quote, seemed to be endowed one and all with a sense of perfect pitch. Hmm. Mike, I feel like a perfect fool. That phrase has got to be like, as soon as we walked out of the caves, somebody called somebody else a perfect fool.

23:54Yeah, I mean, it probably sounded a little gruntier than that, but I absolutely agree. Hey, let us know if you enjoyed our game today. Maybe we'll do it again. You can reach us at booksmartstudios at gmail.com. Or leave a comment under the episode at booksmartstudios.com. All right, Mikey, we done here? We are done. Later, Gator. Some follow the noise.

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