Word: scat
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...posters had been up for days-"State Street is ready for school." The shops had been ready with new wardrobes, the stationery stores with book bags and fountain pens. Last week, schoolchildren in Chicago and elsewhere were reluctantly ready, too. Their jeep-hats bobbed in school corridors, their scat-talk filled the classrooms, some of their jackets bore the inscription "Bebop is spoken here." In bebop or any other language, vacation was definitely over. Across the country, some 30,000,000 public, private and parochial schoolkids, the biggest crowd in history, were back in class or getting ready...
...bred in central Europe in the 15th Century to whip its weight in wild boars. In the U.S., until recently, boxers were as rare as giraffes. Even 16 years ago, says one breeder, "you could lead all the boxers in the country into Times Square, say 'scat,' and they'd have been out of sight in the flick of your finger." Now, still good-natured but also smartly fashionable, some 75,000 boxers (costing up to $5,000 per pup) are on leash in the 48 states...
Then came tours that took Louis to the West Coast and points between. He switched from cornet to trumpet (chiefly because the longer horn "looked better"). In 1926, when he dropped some lyrics on the floor during a recording session, he quickly substituted nonsense syllables, and added "scat-singing" to jazz. He had formed "Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five" (Satchmo, Clarinetist Johnny Dodds, Trombonist Kid Ory, Johnny St. Cyr on the banjo and second wife Lil Hardin Armstrong on the piano) to make recordings of his best numbers for Okeh. When he played Chicago, such youngsters as Bix Beiderbecke...
...large semicircular holes cut in ... the front door. 'What are those for?' he asked. 'To let my cats out,' was the reply. 'But why won't one hole do them?' 'Because,' the old gentleman retorted emphatically, 'when I say Scat! I mean Scat...
...WITH at $17.50 a week. And every cent of it had been hard-earned. Like Walter Winchell and the late Damon Runyon, Robbins had almost singlehanded created his own "language," and built his audience by teaching it to them (see box). He started with a few scattered scat idioms picked up from jazzmen, rapidly invented new ones on principles of alliteration, assonance and (occasionally) metaphor...