Oral history on "uptight" (1966)

Sat Dec 31 14:05:51 UTC 2005

Wilson, your prescriptive rule is stated too abstractly for my tired brain. It doesn't seem familiar, though. Examples would help.

  JL

Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM> wrote:
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Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Wilson Gray
Subject: Re: Oral history on "uptight" (1966)
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I didn't know that there was a source novel till now. Thanks for the
information. Nevertheless, I would be shocked and chagrined to find
that an example of BE slang that I myself didn't become familiar with
till after I got out of the Army in 1962 had already appeared in print
in a book written by, presumably, a white author a year earlier.

I have no idea as to when the film was produced, but a random
assortment of googled sources give the *release* date as 1965, the
year in which I saw it.

BTW, did you ever have to learn a prescriptive rule that stated that
forms like "the number of, the assortment of" requiire a singular
verb, whereas forms like "a number of, an assortment of" require a
plural verb? I learned it so well that I no longer have any intuitions
about such forms. I routinely and consciously apply the rule, which I
learned in high school.

-Wilson

On 12/30/05, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender: American Dialect Society
> Poster: Jonathan Lighter
> Subject: Re: Oral history on "uptight" (1966)
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> The film was produced in 1964.
>
> A search at Amazon.com does not reveal the presence of "uptight," "up tight," or "up-tight" in Edward Lewis Wallant's source novel (1961).
>
> JL
>
> Wilson Gray wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender: American Dialect Society
> Poster: Wilson Gray
> Subject: Re: Oral history on "uptight" (1966)
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On 12/29/05, Benjamin Zimmer wrote:
> >
> > ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> > -----------------------
> > Sender: American Dialect Society
> > Poster: Benjamin Zimmer
> > Subject: Oral history on "uptight" (1966)
> >
> > -------------------------------------------------------------------------=
> ------
> >
> > A few months ago Wilson Gray initiated a thread on the change in
> > connotation of "uptight" from positive ('excellent') to negative
> > ('tense, on edge'). This change apparently occurred sometime in the
> > mid-'60s, despite the 1934 cite given in the OED from J. M. Cain's
> > _The Postman Always Rings Twice_ ("I'm getting up tight now, and I've
> > been thinking about Cora"). Jon Lighter speculated that, given the
> > context, the Cain cite actually meant 'up close (to my imminent
> > execution)' rather than 'tense'. See:
> > http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=3Dind0508A&L=3DADS-L&P=3D1=
> 571
> >
> > Anyway, I've been reading _Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History
> > of Punk_ by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain (1996), and I came across
> > some interesting interviews having to do with a series of mixed-media
> > performances called "Andy Warhol Up-Tight" on Feb. 8-13, 1966. The
> > performances were at the Film-Makers' Cinematheque in New York (125
> > West 41 St) and combined films by Warhol with music by the Velvet
> > Underground.
> >
> > -----
> > p. 12
> > BILLY NAME [Warhol's photographer]: The entire thing was first called
> > "Uptight" because when Andy would do something, everybody would get
> > uptight. Andy was sort of the antithesis to what the avant-garde
> > romantic artists were at that time.
> > Filmmakers like Stan Brakhage and Stan Vanderbeek were still bohemian
> > avant-garde hero artists, whereas Andy was not even an antihero, he
> > was a zero. And it just made them grit their teeth to have Warhol
> > becoming recognized as the core of this thing they had built. So
> > everybody was always uptight whenever we showed up.
> >
> > p. 13
> > RONNIE CUTRONE [Warhol's studio assistant]: The other groups were
> > taking acid. By this time I was basically off of acid, I was into
> > Methedrine, because you had to get uptight. "Uptight" used to have a
> > good connotation -- you know, like Stevie Wonder's song "uptight," but
> > we changed it to mean rigid and paranoid. Hence Methedrine.
> > -----
> >
> > These two accounts are somewhat conflicting (not surprising, given
> > that this is an oral history published three decades after the fact,
> > describing a notoriously drug-addled scene). Billy Name's account
> > suggests that "uptight" =3D 'tense' was in common use by then (note
> > OED's cite from Feb. 13, 1966 in the _Sunday Times_ -- perhaps
> > referring to the Warhol series, then just ending?). Cutrone suggests
> > that the Methedrine users at Warhol's Factory were responsible for the
> > change in meaning and popularized it with the title of the series. Or
> > perhaps the title was meant to have a double meaning: the approbative
> > sense known to the general public through the Stevie Wonder song then
> > on the charts, and the new 'nervous' sense known to speed freaks and
> > others in and around that scene.
> >
> > Warhol's "Up-Tight" series also described here:
> > http://www.warholstars.org/chron/1966.html
> > Excerpt from _Up-Tight: The Velvet Underground Story_ by Victor
> > Bockris and Gerard Malanga:
> > http://www.warholstars.org/warhol/warhol1/warhol1c/warhol1cl/uptight.html
> > Ad in the _East Village Other_:
> >
> > http://www.warholstars.org/warhol/warhol1/andy/warhol/chron/pix/uptight.j=
> pg
> >
> > _Please Kill Me_ is also searchable on Amazon:
> > http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0140266909/
> >
> >
> > --Ben Zimmer
> >
>
> Uh, my point was actually the loss of the *positive* meaning. My earliest
> memory of the use of "up tight" - ca.1962 - is that it could be either
> positive or negative, according to context. The earliest negative use that =
> I
> can actually *document* without doing any research elsewhere than in my
> memory occurs in the 1965 movie, _The Pawnbroker_, when the black robber
> quietly says to the white pawnbroker, "Cool it, baby. Don't get up tight."
> But this negative use was hardly new. Of course, then-Little Stevie Wonder' s
> recording using the phrase with the positive meaning was also released in
> 1965 and probably influenced a far larger number of slang-users than did
> _The Pawnbroker_, a B&W "art" movie destined to become a "classic."
> Likewise, this positive usage was not new. So, we know that the loss of the
> positive meaning had to have started ca.1965, given the ease with which
> anyone can show that the phrase was still being used with both polarities
> during that year.
> --
> -Wilson
>
>

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