Standing; and another restricted term

[Laurence Horn]

At 5:01 PM -0700 5/21/05, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
>"No Standing" signs have been common in NYC for as long as I can
>remember, and an older relative tells me they were already in place
>by the mid-40s.  I was told as a child that "Standing" means parking
>while remaining in the vehicle or leaving someone else in it.  Not
>identical to the official definition below, but close enough for
>most situations, one would think.
>
>JL
>
>Benjamin Barrett <gogaku at IX.NETCOM.COM> wrote:
>---------------------- Information from the mail header
>-----------------------
>Sender: American Dialect Society
>Poster: Benjamin Barrett
>Subject: Standing, Stopping and Parking in the US
>-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>I noticed this past year or so a "No Standing" sign in Seattle. I'd never
>seen one before except in Canada. The meaning was never clear to me, so I
>avoided those areas.
>

I can't remember "NO STANDING" ever being unfamiliar; it's always
used to my knowledge in basically this same sense (parking but not
leaving one's car).

A more unusual (to me) item came up today.  In the post-game press
conference after his Mets defeated the Yankees in this afternoon's
Subway Series game, manager Willie Randolph, a 40-ish
African-American who grew up in Brooklyn, was asked about the
impressive feat of Mets' relief pitcher Dae-Sung Koo who after
standing as far as he could while still being in the batter's box
earlier in the week while taking four pitches and whiffing (on a
called third strike), stood in today in his second major league at
bat ever against the most intimidating pitcher in major league
baseball, the mountain-tall Randy ("the Big Unit") Johnson, and hit
the ball 400 feet for a double over center-fielder Bernie Williams's
head.  Randolph, sounding (on the radio) quite relaxed after the win,
commented that Koo "gave 'em the old okey-doke".  (Background:  If
I'm not mistaken, Koo would have had little if any experience as a
hitter, since pitchers don't bat at all in Korea.)  The reporter
acknowledged that he had no idea what Randolph meant by "the old
okey-doke" and Randolph, incredulous, teased the reporter for being
too old to know the expression, mentioning by name another reporter
present who Randolph said would explain "give 'em the old okey-doke"
to him.  But the second reporter didn't know the expression either,
or so he claimed.  This continued for a while, through other
reporters, none of whom could define the term, although it was clear
from the context that the sense must be "pulled a fast one" or (in
the synonym Randolph eventually supplied) "deked" (i.e. decoyed) them
by pretending he didn't know the first thing about hitting.  But it
was weird--the press conference had by now shifted from being about
Koo's hit (or, later, his impressive slide across home plate to beat
the tag while scoring from second on a bunt) to being about dialect
differences determined by age and, it would appear, ethnicity.  A
google search (mine, although I imagine some of the reporters later
conducted their own) confirms that "(give someone) the (old)
okey-doke" is primarily an African-American expression, perhaps (?)
originating in or popularized by hip-hop music, for 'deke, fake out,
pull a fast one on'.  So the reporters and I, along with thousands of
WFAN listeners, are now more linguistically sophisticated than we
would have been had the Big Unit struck Koo out as everyone would
have predicted.

Larry