Vocabulary for Cheaper by the Dozen
This is a list of words and phrases used in the play Cheaper by the Dozen
that may be unfamiliar to some people or perhaps I just wanted to make a comment about.
The words are listed, more or less, by the order in which they appear in the play.
- Mandarin princess
- Chinese princess with long fingernails
(often as long as the palm of the hand)
- kadooka
- the three-tone sound of an old Klaxon car horn
- Klaxon
- manufacturer of old car horns;
the name comes from a Greek word meaning "shriek";
nowadays the company makes super-loud train horns
- Maxwell
- car manufactured in early 1900s.
- Morse code
- radio & telegraph code implemented by turning
an electrical signal or
carrier wave on and off for different durations of time.
- mushrooms versus toadstools
- generally, the same thing. When a distinction
is made,
mushrooms are edible, and toadstools are usually considered poisonous
- maggots
- larva of fly or other insect
- Eskimo
- indigenous people of northern North America, including both the
Nunavut and the Inuit. Also used to be spelt Esquimau
(plural Esquimaux). Although the so-called "politically
correct" labellers like to use the term Inuit, in reality, all the
Eskimos I've ever known (all in Alaska) prefer to be described by
the term "Native" or "Native Alaskan".
- spinsters
- unmarried women, usually with the connotation that they are
old and too unattractive/uninteresting to any man.
In England, all marriage licences are issued with the words
“spinster” and “bachelor” on them [actually, when checking this legal fact,
I found hearsay that the UK legal practice of calling brides-to-be "spinsters"
was discontinued in 2005]
- Betelgeuse
- brightest star in the constellation Orion
- Orion
- a hunter god in Greek Mythology. This name appears in the
Authorized Version of the Bible (e.g., Amos 5:8, “Seek him that maketh
the seven stars and Orion…”).
However, in the Hebrew, the name
כסיל (Csil) is used,
not the name from Greek, so
it was apparently OK to read this verse out loud in Hebrew without violating the
Law that God didn’t want to hear the name of other gods upon the lips of his
people.
- Michelson’s interferometer
- A device for measuring celestial distances and
sizes by using the properties of split light waves from a single source. This
device was built by Albert Michelson (and it is now becoming vogue to credit
Michelson’s colleague Edward Morley as well) to either prove or disprove the
existence of some sort of æther throughout space (it disproved its existence),
and also, as a side effect, ended up validating key parts of Einstein’s
theory of relativity.
- Victrola
- a device from Victor Record Company for playing sound from a disk with grooves etched in a shape corresponding to the sound waves that has been recorded
- records
- the sound recordings played on a Victrola
- metronome
- a device for marking the passage of time
- Carrie Nation
- woman who would go about fervently attacking saloons
with a hatchet as part of the temperance movement (to abolish alcohol and its
consumption)
- Henry Ford
- inventor of the assembly line
- ja wohl
- German for “yes, verily” (literally);
figuratively, when used in English,
it is used as "I recognise your authority as despot Führer
(or his authorized agent), and affirm obedience to
your command or statement, regardless of my own personal feelings,
for fear of dreadful
retaliation."
- cosmopolitan
- literally, “a citizen of the world”, as in Plato’s
famous statement,
“I am neither an Athenian nor a Greek but a citizen of the world.”
In common usage, it means sophisticated.
- J’ouvre la porte
- French for “I open the door”
- Je ferme la porte
- French for “I shut the door.”
It is interesting to note that if you say “Shut the door” in English, it is sounds
strikingly similar to the French expression
«Je t’adore» which means “I adore thee.”
- slicker
- raincoat
- π∙r2
- formula for the area of a circle
(π is ratio of a circle's circumference
to its diameter, approximately, 3.14159...), and
r is the radius of the circle.
- engineer
- most noble profession
- boxes and barrels
- what Confederate saboteurs behind enemy lines would push onto
Yankee railroad lines in order to hinder the progress of trains; hence, annoying trouble
- needles and pins
- from a Mother Goose nursery rhyme about
Henry VIII’s six wives:
Needles and Pins
Needles and Pins
When a man marries
His Trouble begins.
In the time of King Henry VIII, needles and pins used in fastening clothing
were mostly made in monasteries which King Henry disbanded when he established
the Anglican church (of which he was the head) in order to get rid of the
Roman-Catholic church that had precluded him from divorcing one wife to
marry another.
As a side effect of his marital turmoil, England then had a shortage of
needles & pins.
- Sheba
- North-African queen who visited King Solomon of Israel
- Sheik
- North-African nobleman or elder, or, figuratively,
a romantic and attractive man
- vamp
- To charm and use a man
- rasamatazz
- snazziness
- vo do oh
- who knoweth what this is?
- Tin Liz[zie]
- Ford Model T automobile
- lollapalooza
- something outstanding
- be the cat’s whiskers
- be better than everyone else
- cat’s pajamas
- praiseworthy
- smitten
- past participle of smite (to hit as a knight does to a dragon)
- mach Schnell
- literally, “make fast”, or “hurry up”
- minuet
- a classical dance (or the music for such a dance)
- cotillions
- a formal ball (e.g., debutante ball)
- perchance
- maybe
- cloak
- coat
- quadrille
- French square dance
- vim
- what actors need to have lots of on stage (viz., enthusiastic energy)
- verve
- liveliness or the product of vim
- jiu jitsu
- Literally, "gentle art", in fact is one of the Martial arts
(Martial means relating to Mars, the Roman god of War).
- galvanically
- in a manner of chemical changes brought about electrically
- tête-a-tête
- face to face
(literally, “head to head”)
- Nicholas Murray Butler
- Recipient of the Nobel Peace prize in 1931, he was
a president of Columbia University, a prolific author, and an advisor to
seven U.S. presidents,
including Teddy Roosevelt who called him “Nicholas Miraculous Butler”.
- Pierce Arrow
- car model
- despotism
- a government ruled by an absolute ruler who makes up rules as he goes
- tyranny
-
a government ruled by an absolute ruler with maybe a few laws and a plan.
The flag of the State of Virginia shows the picture of a spear-wielding
Virtue atop of the just-slain oppressive tyrant with the motto
"Sic semper tyrannis"
(meaning "thus always to tyrants"). This motto was uttered when Brutus slew
Julius Cæsar and
when John Wilkes Booth when slew Abraham Lincoln.
- mukluks
- Eskimos’ boots
- gigolo
- male fulfiller of immoral wishes
- Pied Piper
- guy who wasn’t paid for his melodic rat-extermination
services of the town of Hamlin, so he kidnapped all the kids in town by luring
them away with the beautiful music of his pipe
- mumblety-peg
- game whose object is to throw a jackknife and have its blade
stuck firmly in the ground; the loser would have to mumble as he picked up a peg driven into
the ground with his teeth
Cheaper by the Dozen
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