The day after last month's column appeared on everyday rhymes, Michael Enright used an expression on his CBC Radio show The Sunday Edition that is familiar to opera buffs. The phrase is "park and bark," referring to performers who plant themselves in one spot and sing instead of moving around on stage.
The expression is clearly dismissive - singers would bridle at being said to bark, which would really put the cur in curtain call - but the activity itself has its defenders. A Nov. 24 article in The Washington Post said: "There's been a lot of criticism of the old-school approach of 'park and bark' in the past few years, but the ability to keep still onstage conveys a kind of authority and strength that excessive gestures seldom achieve ..."
I tried to trace the phrase's origin, but the earliest items I found (published in 1993) referred to dogs. An outfit in Toledo, Ohio, was hoping at the time to create a string of drive-through restaurants that served only pet food. The Wall Street Journal, discussing the Toledo prototype, wrote: "The outlet's 'park and bark' picnic area features a fire hydrant 'restroom.' "
The mind strays to the concept of operas for dogs, neatly combining the two senses of the expression. After all, if fish have Albert Herring, bats have Die Fledermaus and birds have The Golden Cockerel, it seems only right that dogs should have Corgi and Bess, Tann-Schnauzer, The Barker of Seville or Tales of Arf-Arf-mann.
Responding to the same column on rhymes, reader R.T. Ruggles says the closing sentence, "That's a whole other story, Cory," reminded him of "my navy compatriot, Brother Bobbie Johnson." In 1950, Johnson "had just left the jazz world for the service (not his choice). He always spoke in lilting rhyme. When we met, it was 'What's the story, morning glory?' When we parted, it was always 'See you later, alligator,' with the response, 'In a while, crocodile.' When starting a session, it was usually 'Greetings, Gates, let's celebrate.' ... The jazz rhymes have become clichés, but in the 40s and 50s they were fresh."
They were influential, too. Bill Haley and the Comets used the alligator line in the title of a 1955 cover version of a Bobby Charles song, with the crocodile response in the lyrics. The British group Oasis used the morning-glory line as a 1995 album title.
Ruggles asks for the name of a dictionary of Cockney rhymes. The closest I can come is an entry in Eric Partridge's A Dictionary of Historical Slang, in which he notes that "apples and pears" for stairs was first recorded in 1857, "elephant's trunk" for drunk in 1859, "trouble and strife" for wife in 1929, "dickeybird" for word in 1932, and "rock of ages" for wages in 1937.
Partridge included a few trickier examples, in which the rhyming word is dropped to make it tough for the uninitiated to understand the conversation. Thus, "pork pie" means a lie, but to lie is to tell porkies. The verb "to scarper," meaning to run away, owes its popularity in part to the Scottish natural harbour called Scapa Flow, which rhymes with go. But scarper had been in use since the mid-1800s, and probably owed its existence to the Italian scappare, to escape. The rhyming-slang allusion to Scapa Flow merely gave the verb a boost around the time of the First World War.
In other Word Play news, Canadian singer Luke Gibson, best known for his work with Luke and the Apostles and Kensington Market, released a solo album in 1971 called Another Perfect Day. It has finally made it onto CD, pressed in Korea by an outfit called Big Pink Music. But whoever wrote the cover blurb that's supposed to encourage people to buy the disc was clearly suffering from a severe case of restraint. "He is a capable songwriter," the blurb says, "as well as a nice singer." Curb your enthusiasm, indeed.