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from 1924 - progress 84 years later?
“The average college graduate is a pretty poor specimen, but
all in all he is just about the best we have. Please remember that I
am talking in averages. I know perfectly well that a great many brilliant
men do not come to college and that a great many stupid men do come,
but the colleges get a very fair percentage of the intelligent ones
and a comparatively small percentage of the stupid ones. In other words,
to play with my mixed metaphor a bit, the cream is very thin in places
and the skimmed milk has some very thick clots of cream, but in the
end the cream remains the cream and the milk the milk. Everything taken
into consideration, we get in the colleges the young men with the highest
ideals, the loftiest purpose.”
—
“And Shakspere and Sophocles," Henley concluded for him.
"Edison is an inventive genius, and Ford
is a business genius. Genius hasn't anything  to
do with schools. The colleges, however, could have made both Ford and
Edison bigger men, though they couldn't have made them lesser geniuses.
“No, we must not take the exceptional man as a standard; we've
got to talk about the average. The hand of the Potter shook badly when
he made man. It was at best a careless job. But He made some better
than others, some a little less weak, a little more intelligent. All
in all, those are the men that come to college. The colleges ought to
do a thousand times more for those men than they do do; but, after all,
they do something for them, and I am optimistic enough to believe that
the time will come when they will do more.”
Percy Marks, 1891-1956
from The
plastic age,
1924 [1]
This was made into a
silent film in 1925 with Clara Bow.
The term hotsy-totsy (hottie/totty) was
apparently used in the 1925 (silent) film in the more ‘modern’
usage.
The Oxford English Dictionary [OED] first lists it as 1926 with a different
connotation
1926 B. Reynolds Cocktail Continentale ii. p.29
“And they sure can fix up a rip-snotin’, raring, tearing,
hotsy-totsy time, honey boy.”
- Tottie
- A girl or woman, esp. a ‘good-time’ girl.
1890 Barrère & Leland Dict. Slang II. pp.368/2
Tottie.., a girl, a fast girl.
1914 Joyce Dubliners p.29
“He asked us which of us had the most sweethearts. Mahony mentioned
lightly that he had three totties.”
- Hottie
- A hot-water bottle.
-
- 1947 H. Walsh Fourth Point of Star xx. p.102,
“I am going to ... rub my feet with meth., then get into bed with
a hotty.”
Also from The Oxford English Dictionary [OED]:
The verb‘pet’ (sexual) is
first listed as 1924 from
1924 P. Marks Plastic Age vi. p.53
“ I’m a bad egg. I drink and gamble and pet. I haven’t
gone the limit yet ... but I will.”
Its second listing is said to be from Kinsey in 1953
1953 A. C. Kinsey et al. Sexual Behav. Human Female ix. p.389
“The most responsive females may be the ones who most often pet
to orgasm before marriage.”
However, pet also appears in a Johnnie
Ray song in 1952: Walking my baby back home.
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The Plastic Age
by Percy Marks
BiblioBazaar, 2007
ISBN-10: 1434601765
ISBN-13: 978-1434601766
$12.99 [amazon.com]
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The plastic age
by Johnny Ray
2005, 2 discs
£7.99
[amazon.co.uk]
$13.98 [amazon.com]
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the web address for the article above is
http://www.abelard.org/news/useless_facts2008.php#1924_2008_090608
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