Safire: 'It's A Wrap'

[Benjamin Zimmer]

Safire's "On Language" column this week ('It's A Wrap') questions a scene
in _The Aviator_ in which a party for the 1930 film _Hell's Angels_
features a sign reading, "Hell's Angels 'It's a Wrap'".

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http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/27/magazine/27ONLANGUAGE.html
When did "wrap up" (or "wrapping up," first cited in the sense of
"finishing," in a 1926 book by T.E. Lawrence, best known as Lawrence of
Arabia) turn the verb into a noun, as in "That's a wrap"? The OED's first
citation is from a 1974 cinematographic novel by Michael Ayrton: "Other
cars are heard starting up out of shot and the lights on the pergola go
off, so I assume it's a wrap and the crew is listening to the director
saying something consequential and busy about tomorrow's call."
However, assiduous research turns up this 1957 entry in Charlton Heston's
journal, quoted in the 1998 edition of This Is Orson Welles, by Welles and
Peter Bogdanovich: "We rehearsed all day. . . the studio brass gathering
in the shadows in anxious little knots. By the time we began filming at
5:45, I knew they'd written off the whole day. At 7:40, Orson said: 'OK,
print. That's a wrap on this set.'"
Thus, it appears that the switch from "wrap it up" to "that's a wrap" took
place in the '50s. That seems to make its use in The Aviator about a party
in 1930 an anachronism (from the Greek ana,"back," and chronos, "time").
How does one get this evidence? Went to Amazon.com; searched for
autobiographies of film directors like John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock and
Orson Welles; hit the "search inside the book" feature for "wrap" and up
came the Heston usage in Welles's book. The word hounds and phrase dicks
of the American Dialect Society's listserv may now find an earlier
citation to cast doubt on my conclusion; that's the fun in this
etymological dodge.
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Nice plug for the list, but one wonders why Safire didn't consult those
word hounds and phrase dicks *before* writing the column.  In any case,
his (or his assistant's) Amazon-aided research looks like it stands up --
I don't see anything on the databases antedating Heston's 1957 citation
for the noun "wrap".  There are earlier cinematic cites for "wrap-up",
however:

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1948 _Mansfield News Journal_ (Ohio) 26 Dec. 7/6 No story, production or
cast values were cut, "but the swift wrap-up would have been impossible
without the full cooperation of the star, Kirk Douglas."
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1951 _New York Times_ 11 Nov. X5/4 But just as the cameras were about to
grind, the head lensman and the director decided the light was not good
enough to capture the color of the scene and called for a "wrap up."
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Also, Safire only bothered to antedate the noun "wrap" and not the verb
"wrap up", simply stating that it was "first cited in the sense of
'finishing,' in a 1926 book by T.E. Lawrence."  But the OED2's Lawrence
citation doesn't even fit this sense, instead meaning 'to defeat':

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1926 T. E. LAWRENCE Seven Pillars (1935) III. xxxvi. 213 The British were
wrapping up the Arabs on all sides--at Aden, at Gaza, at Bagdad.
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Regardless of the Lawrence quote, cites are readily available for the
'finishing' sense of "wrap up" before 1926, in both the worlds of film and
sport.  Jesse Sheidlower came across this entry in a film glossary in the
L.A. Times:

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1925 Los Angeles Times 29 Nov. II6/2 _Wrap 'em up,_ dismantling and
packing of the cameras.
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Clearly the expression originally referred to a literal "wrapping up" of
film equipment.  Early sports usages also tend to be rather literal, e.g.,
referring to a trophy or title as being "(all) wrapped up" for a presumed
victor.  The 1925 cite below is more figurative, however:

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1923 _Iowa City Press Citizen_ 28 Jul. 3/4 In his final round, if he could
have played the last three holes in par, four strokes each, he had the
championship all wrapped up and tucked away in his bag.
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1925 _Appleton Post Crescent_ (Wisc.) 17 Jun. 13/1 Walter Johnson Tuesday
wrapped up a beautiful shutout victory for the Senators over the Browns, 3
to 0.
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The phrase "wrap (it) up" meaning 'to finish (something)' started
appearing more frequently in the '30s, but was still mostly restricted to
cinematic and sporting usage.


--Ben Zimmer