Roland (alias Birdman of Brisbane) keeps a few jokes up his sleeve; luckily, his shirts are well laundered so the gags are always nice and clean, and never too near the knuckle. Over the phone this morning I casually asked if he had any fresh jokes for me and, straight off the cuff, he replied:

“Should married couples be frank and earnest? Or should one be a woman?”

and…

“Do babies really come from storks [not to be confused with stalks]? Or is it just a load of poppycock?”

~~~~~~~~~

Incidentally, I much prefer the English interpretation of the word “poppycock” to the Dutch origin (according to online Merriam-Webster):

Origin of POPPYCOCK

For those of you with an avid interest in etymology (and Charlie Chaplin clips) I have pasted an interesting article that I found on Language Blog about the origins of the expression “Off the cuff”.

The “off the cuff” mystery

August 16, 2012 @ 3:05 pm · Filed by Mark Liberman under Idioms, Language and culture

The other day, someone asked me about the origins of the phrase “off the cuff”. I’ve always assumed that it had something to do with the old practice of writing informal notes on men’s detachable (and disposable) cuffs. And the OED’s entry agrees, glossing it as

off the cuff (as if from notes made on the shirt-cuff) orig. U.S., extempore, on the spur of the moment, unrehearsed

But as far as I know, the practice of wearing detachable (and sometimes disposable) cuffs ended by the time of the first world war or even before, while the OED’s earliest citation for this idiom is from 1938:

1938 New York Panorama (Federal Writers’ Project, N.Y.) vi. 157   Double talk is created by mixing plausible-sounding gibberish into ordinary conversation, the speaker keeping a straight face or dead pan and enumerating casually or off the cuff.
1941 Time (Air Exp. Ed.) 4 Aug. 1/1   Talking off the cuff to a group of civilian-defense volunteers he made them a little homily.
1944 Penguin New Writing XX. 130   In that scene, shot off the cuff in a shockingly bad light, there leapt out of the screen..something of the real human guts and dignity.
1948 Economist 3 July 17/2   Mr. Truman’s off-the-cuff comment.

So I figured that the OED just hadn’t researched the idiom adequately. But a fairly extensive search through various online archives only antedated the OED’s citation by two years, to 1936:

The Google Ngrams plot shows origin in the 1930s, and adoption between 1945 and 1960:

My searches also informed me that the early uses of the phrase included not only that improvised-movie-making sense, but also the sense of alerting others to a random event, or perhaps enumerating a diverse list of events, presumably from notes jotting on one of those cuffs. Thus in November of 1942, Billboard began a regular column listing random events, under the heading “Off The Cuff”. Here are (what I think are) the first two:

Here’s some information about those disposable paper shirt cuffs, from Giles Slade, Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America, 2007:

What has been called “disposable culture” or “the throwaway ethic” began in America around the middle of the nineteenth century when a variety of cheap materials became available to industry. Innovations in the machinery of paper production, for example, made paper a practical substitute for cloth. The millions of paper shirt fronts (bosoms, as they were called), as well as the collars and cuffs that adorned nineteenth-century American men, owed their commercial success to this technological advance.

The beauty of these disposable products, as far as paper manufacturers were concerned, was that demand for them seemed endless. In 1872 America produced 150 million disposable shirt collars and cuffs. Men found paper clothing parts convenient because laundry services in those days were unreliable, expensive, and available mainly in large urban centers. America was still predominantly a rural culture, and before the advent of modern washing machines in the twentieth centruy, laundry was an onerous, labor-intensive task undertaken by women once weekly on Blue Tuesday. Single men simpy lacked access to professional or spousal laundry services. They bought replaceable shirt parts in bulk and changed into them whenever the most visible parts of their attire became stained or discolored.

And all the evidence that I can find suggests that the fad for disposable paper cuffs ended well before 1900. Thus “History Lesson: Glen Paper Collar Co. owners were inventors first“, The Saratogian 8/24/2009:

During the 1870s, a peculiar clothing fad swept the country. Disposable cotton-based paper collars were introduced to the upper classes as a way of maintaining a fresh, white collar rather than attempting to clean soiled cloth collars.

Some of the first paper collars in the country were manufactured two miles north of Ballston by Lindley Murray Crane, a paper mill owner and holder of three patents. Henry Mann’s father also manufactured paper collar materials in nearby Factory Village for some years under the partnership of Mann & Laflin.

Medbery and Mann recognized the potential, and rented space at the Blue Mill to establish the Glen Paper Collar Co. In their first year, the partnership produced 9 million collars. Soon they occupied the entire building. In 1871, they built a five-story, 60-foot by 40-foot addition, reportedly constructed in 20 days. They rented the old Waverly Hall for use as a packing station and salesroom.

Shipments of collars increased. At its height in 1875, the factory was producing 21 million paper collars and 5 million paper cuffs annually employing 150 people, becoming one of the world’s biggest producers. […]

But the fad died out in the mid-1870s. In 1876 Medbery moved to Newburg,New York and became a member of the firm James A. Townsend & Co., manufacturers of writing papers.

This leaves us with four possibilities:

1. Disposable paper cuffs remained in use, at least in certain groups, right up through 1950 or so;
2. Movie directors, entertainment journalists, and politicians continued to write on their cuffs long after the cuffs ceased to be disposable;
3. The expression “off the cuff” originated at some point around 1875, but managed to avoid appearing in print until 1936, and did not become common until the late 1940s, when the physical basis of the metaphor was long dead;
4. The expression was born when the metaphor was already long dead.

My feeling is that (1) is implausible (2) is silly, (3) is unlikely, and (4) is weird.

So what happened?

Update — from W.W. Aulick, “The Theatre”,  The Gateway (“a magazine of the times”), May 1913:

“Pop” Flannery, of the City News, found fault with one of the stage reporters because he made a pencil note on his cuff. “Not a bit like it,” declared Mr. Flannery, “only a make-believe reporter makes notes on his cuff.”

Master James Murray, who looks after the Evening Journal at the Courts Building, hadn’t heard “Pop” Flannery’s remark. Mr. Murray told the manager of the Astor–just in a friendly sort of way y’understand–that it was too bad one of the stage reporters hadn’t been told to make a note or two on his cuff. “It would have been a realistic little touch, do you see?” pointed out Mr. Murray.

This suggests that in imagination or in reality, certain sorts of people continued to make notes on their cuffs long after the paper-cuffs fad had faded. Still, I rather doubt that this was a common real-world practice in the 1936-1950 period.

Update #2 — And, as Robert Coren points out in the comments, there’s this scene from Modern Times:

Given how popular Chaplin was, this might well explain why the concept and the associated idiom rose to prominence in the ten or fifteen years after the movie was released.

In conclusion, as I’ve learned from the comments, detachable cuffs were used as note pads even when they were not disposable; and the practice of starching the cuffs of (white) shirts apparently made them suitable for note-taking even when the cuffs were not detachable. This helps us to bridge the half-century gap between the end of the disposable-cuff fad and the rise of the “off-the-cuff” idiom. Still, the idiom grew in popularity at a time (the late 1940s) when the actual practice of writing notes on cuffs must have been nearly dead, at best a memory for older members of the American population — or, perhaps more likely, an image from that Charlie Chaplin movie.

It had to be done; it was a job a long time in the making and an age in the waiting. At length, when there was no more room for clothing in either the wardrobe, pigeon-hole compartments, or the chest of drawers (two drawers of which needed to be glued back together again), and the fresh piles of clean washing and ironing had to sit patiently on top of the chest, I knew the time had come. No more procrastination, excuses, prevarication or hopes for the visitation of a benevolent angel or good fairy; and no more interim, half-hearted, ten-minute efforts in order to close one dodgy, over-filled drawer.

Last Saturday was slave day (as we used to call it when I was a child in Australia). Chuck-out operations began with the upending of the bottom three drawers (three “cheers” or “Bottoms up!”) and categorising each newly freed item, some of which had become institutionalised and unfit for modern society after their long incarceration; at the ready were various receptacles – the rubbish sack, the charity shop bag, the bag for never worn garments bearing labels (purchased with over-optimism during the sales – you know, “One day I’ll get into that!”), the bag to pass around the family and, not forgetting, the drawer itself. A few items did the rounds from one bag to another and ended up back in the drawers they had come from but, for the most part, the decision-making became less arduous after exercising my new mantra, “If you haven’t worn it for two years… you won’t wear it again” (my old mantra – “if you haven’t worn it for one year…” – had to be amended due to the amount of garments finding their way back from sacks to drawers!).

To save me from bending, the contents of the two upper drawers were piled, one drawer’s worth at a time, on top of the chest of drawers. First came the night-wear and socks from the second drawer. Three sexy, baby-doll outfits went back in (well, they are so flimsy); now they never seem to wear out – probably because they don’t stay on long enough (when they are worn at all) and you’d never choose to sleep in them; but they were pleased to see the light of day. On the basis of aesthetics, the grey and white polka dot fluffy pyjama pants had to go, as did the the psychedelic nightie that once used to be a short summer dress; and two faded and jaded pyjama bottoms with almost matching camisoles. Thirty-two pairs of socks, several in varying degrees of decrepitude, vied for the bin bag; the six without partners went in immediately and twenty pairs had a stay of execution on account of their suitability for use with different shoes.

The underwear drawer proved to be the most challenging. How many bras does a woman need? Of course, the real question is –  how many bras actually fit? On the basis that most of the bras might have their day one day, only two of the assembled fourteen were thrown into the rubbish sack, and another two, still with labels, went into the charity bag. Of the numerous pairs of panties (many retained purely for their prettiness), six cotton ones went into a new receptacle – the paint-rag bag.

It took nearly all day to go through everything. Now every part of furniture that was intended to slide slides and all doors open and shut without force. The clothing in the wardrobe is colour-coded and easily accessible; shoes, in neat matching pairs, adorn the immaculately clean lower shelf and the dust and dead spiders have disappeared from the dark recesses under the shelf. Now is the time for someone to ask, “May I look in your wardrobe?” (not that anyone has ever asked such a thing, though I lived in dread).

Another little unexpected bonus from my labours was the unearthing of lost treasures. Amongst the found items were two pairs of castanets (for romantic Spanish evenings), two gold rings (“four calling birds…”) and a silver turtle ring with a nodding head (you have to see it to love it!), four gold pendants, one authentic boomerang (small-sized for English folk), four purses (one filled with Australian dollars, another with Euros – no notes, unfortunately), two promises from Chris, signed and dated 4.10.06, two pairs of brass finger cymbals (for belly dancing), a thirty-foot blue ribbon on a stick for Olympic ribbon dancing (soon to be available on E-bay), one authentic small-sized didgeridoo (nicely painted for tourists), two packs of safety pins, three reels of cotton, five oestrogen patches, allergy tablets and a plaster cast of my bottom set of teeth complete with original plastic mouth-guard (for a moment I thought I had found part of a skull!). Well, they are my idea of lost treasures, if not yours.

“What is a blog?” asked the lady opposite me at the table. For such a pretty and soft looking woman she had an incongruously hard edge to her voice, which took me aback a little.

This was a couple of months ago, during my sojourn in Australia, while I was visiting friends on Coochiemudlo Island, just off the coast of Brisbane. I had barely opened my mouth to reply to the neighbour of one of my friends when the narky woman got in first.

“Is it a diary?” she asked patronisingly.

“No, but it may refer to things that I’ve done, or my thoughts on a particular subject, anything I want to say really – it’s my site so I say what I wish, within reason. I don’t want to be controversial or hurt anyone’s feelings.”

“I suppose it’s like Facebook,” she sneered.

“No…”, I was about to explain.

“I don’t like Facebook. It seems to me that it’s all about self-aggrandisement; I bet a blog is the same,” her tongue lashed out like a stingray’s tail.

(The woman really had it in for blogs, or perhaps it was me; maybe she simply didn’t like the cut of my jib.)

“On the contrary,” I answered, smiling, in an effort not to show that I was stung, “in general my posts are self-deprecating and funny – well I hope they are funny.”

“But what is the purpose of a blog?”

Now I could have replied in my usual way, stating my original perception of the purpose for my blog – to get people around the world to see my site, which is also a showcase for my paintings and books; and I could have added that, not only is it fun, but also I’m intending to cherry-pick the best posts and put them into books (in the right chronological order for happy reading); and I could have told her about one of the most unexpected benefits of my blog – of being accessible to friends and acquaintances with whom I had lost contact over the years. But instead I told her what my niece’s boyfriend had told me when he urged me to build my own website and blog:

“Sally, everyone in the world who is anyone has an Internet presence and a blog. Brad Pitt has one, Alan Sugar has one one, all the film stars, pop stars and racing drivers – everyone! You will be nothing without a blog.”

Miss Stingray said nothing more on the subject but I knew what she was thinking…

“Self-aggrandisement!”