Word: mugg
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...came out, Editor Green herded his staffers (Variety calls them "muggs") upstairs into a dusty, top-floor parlor. He was going away for 'a couple of months, he said, and short, swart, 210-pound Nat Kahn, eight years a mugg, would be boss. Out in Hollywood, Green will help Warner Bros, erect it's long-planned monument to the man who made slangy Variety the "showbiz" oracle it is: Founder Sime ("Mr. Broadway") Silverman...
...Mugg-Maker. From his desk overlooking the street, on a dais where a coutouriére's models once paraded. Silverman fed items to fledgling Gossip Walter Winchell, made knowing muggs out of Jack Lait (now editor of Hearst's New York Mirror) and Columnist Louis Sobol, bought pieces from Quentin Reynolds, Funnymen Fred Allen, Joe Laurie Jr., Milton Berle. As show business became big business and Variety grew, he covered radio and the "niteries," added a Hollywood daily edition and bureaus in London and Paris, picked up scores of stringers in the U.S. and abroad...
Like most experts, Variety's muggs find it difficult to explain themselves. (A mugg, reviewing a picture, must report whether 1) it will sell; 2) it is worth seeing-with the accent on the former.) Sime tried to define the requirements 15 years ago: "To be a mugg you've got to fit. ... A mugg can be practical and idealistic at the same time. Maybe you got to be a little bit goofy to be that...
...Equally irresistible is the mugg in high society ("Bang-bang, fella," says Mr. Grant to the shocked butler who discovers his revolver) and the untamed male who submits to the implacable housekeeping of a respectable woman...
...verb "to mugg" apparently stems from the dank soil of 19th Century prisons, where "mugger" was synonymous with footpad-"one of the wretched horde who haunt the street at midnight to rob drunken men." Its meaning, as given by the American Thesaurus of Slang: robbery with violence. In New York City muggers usually attack from behind if possible, throwing one arm around the victim's neck, while the assistant muggers frisk the victim...