Halls of ivy

GEORGE THOMPSON thompsng at ELMER4.BOBST.NYU.EDU
Mon Mar 13 20:59:33 UTC 2000


Fred Shapiro contributed the following to the "halls of ivy"
discussion"

"The earliest citation I can readily find for this phrase is the
following:

"1950 _Dramatics_ Dec. 12  (heading) Radio program of the month:
"Halls of Ivy."

"I don't know when the radio program referred to here began its run.

"I'd say it's a pretty safe bet that the phrase derives from the
tradition of planting university buildings with ivy, and has nothing
to do with the Roman numeral IV."

I vaguely remember the show as a TV show, presumably in the early
fifties: starred Ronald Coleman, who played the president of some
very distinguished college.  His character's name was Dr. William
Todhunter Hall; the college was named "Ivy College."  Hall and his
wife were therefore "The Halls of Ivy".  (Get it? Not "Hall 'n'
them")   Alex McNeil's "Total Television" describes it as a sitcom,
featuring the chairman of the board of trustees, the housekeeper
and a Professor Merriweather.  You can imagine what mirthful
antics that crew used to get up to.  We were hard up for
entertainment back then.  What can I say?  Eisenhower was president.

But the title has to have played upon a preexisting hackneyed phrase.
 Another sitcom of the 50s was "The People's Choice."  Starring (I
think) Jackie Cooper, as the gofer for a small-town mayor named
Peoples, with a terminally cute daughter named Amanda who was in love
with the boy lead.  This made Cooper's character "The Peoples'
Choice".  (Amanda Peoples had chosen him, right?)  Am I wrong to
suspect that both these shows started off with the title, and
characters and situations were then thought up to justify it?

As for the preference people have for absurd word histories: I had
seen once a statement that "conjurors" were so-called because they
had once been used in law courts to fool or "con" the jurors.  I
mentioned it to a friend who I would have thought would have seen
immediately the absurdity of taking a recent slang word to explain an
ancient word, to say nothing of the unlikelihood that legal theorists
would ever have thought that law cases could be satisfactorily
settled by having someone pull quarters out of the witnesses' noses.
But he jumped on it immediately and no doubt still believes it.

GAT



More information about the Ads-l mailing list