Latest OED Additions/Peoria

[Jonathan Lighter]

This phr. came up a few months ago.  Someone (was it Fred ?) found what appeared to be a reference to it in the musical revue _Piff ! Paff ! Pouff !_, by W. Jerome & J. Schwartz (1904).

A reading of the musical score - apparently all that remains of the show - reveals a song with the line "I'm the ghost [i.e., paymaster] of a troupe that disbanded in Peoria."  This seems to indicate that Peoria was already regarded in the theater world as a proverbial hick town. The phr. "play in Peoria," however, does not appear.

Bierce's _Devil's Dictionary_ (1911) seems to confirm this notion. In defining _dullard_, he has this to say:

"The intellectual center of the race is somewhere about Peoria, Illinois, but the New England Dullard is the most shockingly moral."

Berry & Van den Bark's _American Thesaurus of Slang_ (1943) also list "Peoria" among "hick towns" such as Podunk and Squedunk.


JL



Jesse Sheidlower <jester at PANIX.COM> wrote:
---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Jesse Sheidlower
Subject: Re: Latest OED Additions
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

On Mon, Sep 12, 2005 at 09:56:26AM -0400, Fred Shapiro wrote:
> Two questions for Jesse: The OED has posted its latest batch of new
> entries, but I don't see the usual listing of new items from across the
> alphabet. Am I missing something?

Because of our moving to a new computer system, we did a double batch
in June, so the "September" out-of-sequence new words were published
then.

> Also, I don't see the phrase "play in Peoria"
> s.v. _Peoria_; presumably this will be s.v. _play_. Can
> Jesse tell us what is the earliest citation OED has for
> "play in Peoria"?

No, it's in under _Peoria_ n.(2) (there are two _Peoria_s). We
define "play in Peoria," but don't separate it out from the
rest of the entry, so we didn't specifically look for the
earliest example of this phrase. 1975 is the earliest example
in the entry, with 1924 as the first quote for the sense as a
whole. If you have something earlier for _play_ I'll happily
put it in.

Jesse Sheidlower
OED


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