[Ads-l] cheesecake antedating (?) 1928

Stephen Goranson goranson at DUKE.EDU
Thu Aug 1 17:26:17 UTC 2019


OED, cheesecake n. sense 2 in US slang has, 1929.

Sept 23, 1928. the Waco-News-Herald-Times-Tribune [newspapers. com] p. 14 col. 1
[headline:] Newspaper Play as Seen Through Reviewer's Eyes: 'Gentlemen of the Press' is a Mixture of Comedy, Drama, Pathos, Greatly Overdrawn [from Philip Schuler in the September issue of Editor and Publisher]

[Columns 3-4-5, for a different article, happens to have a drawing of a film set with a woman's knees prominently shown]
[Cheesecake was also a nickname of some mobsters. The following scene is in a speakeasy apparently run by "The Racket."]

Enter then the sophisticated love element with the name of Pansy True, an authentic sob sister portrayed by Carlotta Irwin. She let it be known between cigaret [sic] puffs and cheesecake views of her knees that she was that way about Charlie...."

Stephen Goranson
http://people.duke.edu/~goranson/





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