"a nice girl like you"

George Thompson george.thompson at NYU.EDU
Sat Jun 25 16:41:22 UTC 2011


I'm quite sure that something similar to this appears in Polly Adler's
autobiography, A House Is Not A Home, published in the mid 1950s.  As I
recall, she instructed her employees that if they were asked such a question
by a john, the proper answer was "just lucky, I guess".

GAT

On Sat, Jun 25, 2011 at 8:41 AM, Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com>wrote:

> YBQ lacks the classic, facetious pick-up line, "What's a nice girl like you
> doing in a place like this?"
>
> But what's even worse is that GB searches don't take it back any earlier
> than the 1990s - despite the fact that I recall it well from high school,
> very probably because Martin Scorsese directed a short feature with that
> title in 1963. (I used the phrase frequently, and it got me nowhere.)
>
> I haven't checked elsewhere.
>
> But WTH's with GB?
>
> JL
>
> --
> "If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>



--
George A. Thompson
Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre", Northwestern Univ.
Pr., 1998, but nothing much since then.

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org



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