B-girl [was D-girl]

[Laurence Horn]

>On Sat, 21 Apr 2001 17:12:55 -0500 Mark Odegard
>
>>  'D-girl' brought to mind 'B-girl'. I've only heard B-girl in old
>>  movies.
>
>I am sorry to hear that. But I am happy to find an area on this list
>where I have some expertise, for in my youth I had many friends who
>frequented bars.
>
>A B-girl is indeed a hostess and certainly different from a prostitute.
>That is not to say that she is necessarily celebrate, but the contractual
>responsibility to the recreational facility in which she works is only to
>be friendly with patrons and get them to buy drinks, for her and
>themselves (did I get the reflexives right?), in copious quantities, from
>which she gets a cut. Whether her friendliness continues after the
>facility closes, which may well be after sunrise (I am told), is entirely
>up to the girl. And B-girls are more selective.
>
>(Well, that last bit I know from personal experience.)
>
Not to speak of celebration (or should that be celebracy?), but I
thought it worth mentioning the extensive entry in RHHDAS for B-girl
('a woman employed by a bar, nightclub, or the like, to act as a
companion to male customers and to induce them to buy drinks, and
usually paid a percentage of what the customers spend'), since it
traces the origin not to B as in 'bar' or B as in 'buy', but to a
more complicated history, evidently discussed in Peter Tamony's 1965
Am Sp article, which 'derives the initial ultimately from
beading-oil', although the entry surmises that 'the idea of putting
the bee on cumstomers in a bar has also contributed to the term's
evolution'.   (another case of the lexical reflex of what Freud
called overdetermination)  Here are the first three entries, of which
only the third contains the term itself, but the first two are
certainly related.
========
1911  Social Evil in Chicago [sounds like a prequel to Mamet's Sexual
Perversity in Chicago]  194  The mixed drinks brought to the
prostitute [!] are counterfeit.  For instance the girl orders a "B"
ginger ale highball.  This is colored water made in imitation of this
drink.

1935  Pollock Underworld Speaks.  Bee drinker, female entertainers in
night clubs, who drink cold tea [= ice tea?] camouflaged as liquor,
for which customers pay the full price.

1936 in Tamony Americanisms (No. 6) 7:  No B Girls buzzing around you
here to sip tea you think  is a highball.  No hostesses.
==========
There's a later reference to "whores and B-girls", showing that the
categories are distinct (if related), presumably differentiated
chiefly according to what is feigned.  It might also be worth
mentioning a much later and unrelated "b-girl" 'a young woman who is
a performer or devotee of rap music', where the initial is from break
dance and is paralleled and prefigured by "b-boy".  Could lead to
some confusion, I fear.

larry
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