I need help in recalling the origin of a phrase. I am unsure if it came from an old movie or an old television show, or possibly even from an old vaudeville routine.
Over the years, my wife and I have frequently quoted the phrase, however now neither of us can recall from whence it came from. Nonetheless, we are both positive that it was not a creation of our own.
The phrase is some perturbation of “wore white kid gloves, had a trace of an accent and walked with a limp”.
We are even unsure in what context the phrase was spoken, however our general feeling is that it was done in a comic mood, possibly in reference to a suspect in a spy or detective story.
Potential origins that we have considered are the ‘Dick Van Dyke Show’, 'Perry Mason" and various Marx Bros. films. Thus far however, none of these shows appear to be the source.
Any help tracking this down would be gratefully accepted. Even if you don’t know where it originated, we’d be thrilled to hear that others have heard the phrase - for confirmation that we’re not crazy (or that our hallucination is shared).
And that phrase (and the resulting skit) seeming date from vaudeville. Perhaps the ‘…wore white kid gloves…’ also hails from that period. Unfortunately, the Internet is quiet on that possibility. Still, I’d love to hear from other folks who have a recollection of it (even a vague recollection).
I feel compelled to submit this nitpick because of an interesting and startling double redundancy, and because I get to say “double redundancy.”
The first “from” and the second “from” need not be used and are in fact incorrect. People get “whence” wrong a lot; it’s a good word precisely because it means “from where.” (I think it is a rare locative in the English language.)
I don’t know whether it’s directly related or it simply was a coincidence when two different people were trying to come up with representative luxury items, but depending on who you listen to that was one of the items in the list given by Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba, “The Great Captain”, when his employers asked him what the heck was he spending so much money on. The list he sent accounted for every penny he’d received but by listing purchases for luxury items such as, well, white kid gloves for every single soldier in his host (other acounts say “perfumed gloves” or “perfumed kid gloves”). The details on the actual list are lost / have been distorted in the recounting (and if anybody has the actual, original list, I don’t know where it is), but “the Great Captain’s accounting” has come to mean any accounting one isn’t really supposed to take seriously, specially when given in response to micromanagers (such as those hourly reports by which it turns out that nobody ever takes a break, factories clean themselves…)
:smack: As I stumbled backwards from a restaurant chair, I remembered “locative” is a case in Latin, so is implemented with nouns where motion is involved. It does carry on, nonetheless, in a few instances in English.
I accordingly headed homeward–moving foreward and westward toward Riverside Drive–to type this correction. There I stomped computerwards and here are some examples that come to me.
ETA: Isn’t there an Internet law–or is it a local Straight Dope one–that in every typographic or grammar correction a new one will be introduced? I know I’ve seen it somewhere.