[Ads-l] catbird seat (1910)

[Ben Zimmer]

Garson previously antedated "(in) the catbird seat" to 1916 -- see below.
Here it is from 1910 (without the "in").

Ledger-Dispatch (Norfolk, Va.), June 28, 1910, p. 4, col. 3
Col. Roosevelt will never convince Governor Hughes that the Supreme Court
bench is not the cat-bird seat.
https://www.newspapers.com/article/ledger-star-cat-bird-seat/169255562/

--bgz

On Sun, Jan 9, 2011 at 5:25 AM Garson O'Toole <adsgarsonotoole at gmail.com>
wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Garson O'Toole <adsgarsonotoole at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Idiom: In the catbird seat (antedating 1916)
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> In the catbird seat
>
> This phrase is in the OED, HDAS and many other slang dictionaries. The
> World Wide Words website has a page about the saying, and so does the
> Phrase Finder website. Wikipedia has an entry for the idiom.
>
> http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-cat2.htm
> http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/87600.html
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catbird_seat
>
> All of the references I have examined cite the classic 1942 short
> story by James Thurber titled "The Catbird Seat" as the first known
> appearance in print of the expression. The work appeared in the
> November 14, 1942 issue of the New Yorker. Here is the relevant OED
> definition:
>
> catbird, n.
> 2. Phr. the catbird seat: a superior or advantageous position. U.S. slang.
>
> Michael Quinion notes an association with poker:
>
> Red Barber said in the Saturday Review in 1958 that he first heard it
> during a game of penny-ante poker while he was in Cincinnati,
> presumably sometime in the 1930s, and borrowed it for his radio
> broadcasts.
>
> The 1916 citation below uses the phrase in the domain of poker. The
> author describes a series of occasions where he thinks laughter is
> appropriate:
>
> Cite: 1916, Report of the Thirty-Third Annual Session of the Georgia
> Bar Association, Held at Tybee Island Georgia June 1-3, 1916,
> Interesting and Humorous Experiences at the Bar: Paper by Roland Ellis
> of Macon, Page 180, J.W. Burke Company, Macon, Georgia. (Google Books
> full view)
>
> Or, to chuckle like a loser at 2 A. M. in the catbird seat as he
> squeezes an ace-high flush, to have the stenographer of the member of
> the court of review assigned your cause, hand you the lemon of an
> unread record, as he headnotes the information that the discretion of
> the bonehead below "will not be disturbed."
>
>
> http://books.google.com/books?id=lsE8AAAAIAAJ&q=catbird#v=snippet&q=catbird&f=false
>
>

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