World Wide Words -- 17 Jun 00 (addendum)

[Michael Quinion]

WORLD WIDE WORDS     ISSUE 195 (addendum)     Saturday 17 June 2000
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This week's issue has the question missing in a Q&A piece. Sorry
about that. This is what the piece should have been like.

Q. For years I've wondered about the origin of the term 'eighty-
six', which I've heard mainly among restaurant workers. It seems to
mean either that the restaurant is out of something ("we're eighty-
six on flounder") or, less often, that something should be gotten
rid of ("eighty-six that monkey - the health department is
outside"). A television program recently reported that it
originated at a New York City speakeasy, Chumley's, located at 86
Bedford Street. During Prohibition, when a raid was imminent, a cop
on the take would call and warn the proprietor to "eighty-six it":
hide the booze and get the customers out. The story sounds
plausible, but I wonder whether you can confirm it. [John Branch in
the USA; related questions came from Danny Child and Rodney Breen
in the UK, and Midge Peltonen in the USA]

A. One of the standard stories about the origin of this puzzling
expression does connect it to Chumley's, though the one I've heard
is that when a customer was forcefully ejected from the premises,
he would find himself lying woozily on the sidewalk looking up at
the number 86 on the door. Neither story, I'm sorry to have to tell
you, is likely to be true.

There are other explanations: that it derives from British merchant
shipping, in which the standard crew was 85, so that the 86th man
was left behind; that 86 was the number of the American law that
forbade bartenders to serve anyone who was drunk (stories disagree
about which state it had been enacted in); that a fashionable New
York restaurant only had 85 tables, so the eighty-sixth was the one
you gave to somebody you didn't want to serve; or that a restaurant
(usually said to be in New York) had an especially popular item as
number 86 on the menu, so that it frequently ran out. All but the
last send my bullshit detector into overload.

It does seem to be true that 'eighty-six' originated in restaurants
and bars in the late 1920s or early 1930s; the first firmly
attested source is in the journal _American Speech_ for February
1936; another example may be from the mid 1920s - the date is
uncertain - which would rule out Chumley's, as it didn't open until
1927. The original sense was that the establishment had run out of
some item on the menu.

Nobody knows why 'eighty-six' was so applied. The _Oxford English
Dictionary_ suggests it may have been rhyming slang for 'nix',
which seems plausible. Although it's often thought of as typically
American, 'nix' actually entered the language in the latter part of
the eighteenth century in Britain; it was borrowed from a version
of the German 'nichts', nothing. But it seems that 'eighty-six' was
created as rhyming slang in the United States.

The sense that indicated a patron was not to be served because he
was drunk or obnoxious appeared later (the first written example is
only from 1943); the verb meaning to discard or get rid of
something is even more recent, from the 1950s.

Many people quote other examples of number slang used by hard-
pressed servers: '99' meant "the manager is prowling about" and
'98' similarly referred to the assistant manager (was '97' a
busybody child who wanted to grow up to be a manager?); '19' is a
banana split; '55' is root beer, and so on. Presumably some of
these related to the numbering on a standard menu somewhere at some
time, but the details have been lost.