Soup and fish

 

Fish and Chips

Fred Laidler 

raka motsatsen till vad inlägget handlar om

”Like the time I went with Harry to fetch his weekly from the Chink’s, and his best soup-and-fish underwear was missin’, and about a dozen yellow men started to

jabber away together: that’s about how much I understand that kid sometimes. Look at her now!”

             från ”Sister Stuff”

             av Leslie Gordon Barnard

Ibland är jag för lat för att slå upp något i samma stund som ordet eller uttrycket kommer för mig. 

Men förr eller senare brukar uttrycket dyka upp igen — råkar det då vara ett relativt ovanligt uttryck, och jag snubblar över det två dagar i rad — ja, då måste jag ju ta’ reda på varifrån det härstammar.

Det var när jag plitade ihop inlägget om systrar, som ”soup and fish” förekom i en text för andra gången, och jag begav mig ut på nätet, för att se om där finns något om uttryckets ursprung.

(Behöver jag påpeka att det är olämpligt att använda ordet chink, nu för tiden?)

Hos World Wide Words hittar jag följande:

The soup and fish is a man’s evening dress, dinner suit, or dress suit, though I should really instead refer to it as a tuxedo, since — despite Bertie Wooster’s mainly London milieu — the phrase seems to be natively American.

Until I went delving in old US newspapers, I thought that Wodehouse had invented it. Indeed, the OED gives him the credit for its first use, in Piccadilly Jim in 1918: “He took me to supper at some swell joint where they all had the soup-and-fish on but me. I felt like a dirty deuce in a clean deck.” But there are earlier examples, such as this from The Atlanta Constitution of November 1914, in a report about local kids being given a slap-up meal by the Rotary Club: “There’s going to be no ‘fess up’ business; no ‘soup and fish’ outfits. It’ll be just a good dinner.”

But why soup and fish? Well, one dons these duds for a special occasion such as a formal meal. This is likely to be a heavyweight event, with many courses, starting with soup and followed by fish before one gets to the main event of the meat course. So the soup-and-fish is what one wears to consume the soup and fish.

Incidentally, one of the more delightful aspects of hunting down this kind of language is that sometimes you get more than you were expecting. The Grand Rapids Tribune in February 1915 included this: “After donning the complete Soup and Fish known in swozzey circles as Thirteen and the Odd, he didn’t look as much like a waiter as one might have supposed.” Thirteen and the Odd? There are other examples to be found, though only a few. Jonathon Green notes in the Cassell’s Dictionary of Slang that it is long-obsolete slang for a tail-coat, as worn with the full fig of white tie and tails, but says that its origin is unknown. Well, did you ever?