It’s the big fat ass of the average American. Big as a wall.
The word pocketbook always makes me think of Lionel Barrymore in Grand Hotel; having been told he his terminally ill he has cashed out his life savings and is carrying it around with him in his “pocketbook”, which he then proceeds to lose (or have stolen–I don’t remember for sure).
Today, pocketbook is one of those quaint words which are still much more current in figurative allusions, e.g. “In this campaign season pocketbook issues have resonated strongly with the voters.” This is a bit similar to the word budget, which originally meant a little bag in which you might set some money aside, but now has a similar figurative meaning.
See also carfare, originally meaning what it cost to ride the streetcar, but still used today to mean the cost to ride the bus, metro, or whatever.
I first saw pocketbook in Nancy Drew books too and I remember imagining the cutest little kind of hollowed-out book wallet thing. She sure did wear a lot of lipstick, that Nancy.
I’ve actually heard the little billfold thing that you guys are calling a pocketbook being described as a purse, as in “Get my purse out of my purse.”
I have not heard the word pocketbook used in a long time–only amongst the genteel of my grandparents generation. I have read it, though.
“Pocketbook” is still in use some places in the Midatlantic states.
It occurs to me that I don’t think I’ve really ever heard anyone mention their pocketbook in conversation, except the metaphorical meaning (“pocketbook issues,” “hit someone hard in the pocketbook”).
It might have been a regional or generational thing, but one of my grandmothers, born in SLC in the 1880s, always referred to it as simply a “bag”. My other grandmother from Illinois never used that term.
Soylent Juicy: From the other side of the water it now amuses me to think that for a long time, I didn’t realize that, in the UK, “fruit machines” were what we call ‘slot machines’. Seriously. In my public middle and high schools of the 1970s, we actually had vending machines on campus that sold–fruit. *That’s *what I thought a fruit machine was.
For myself- female, mid-20’s, grew up in the Pacific Northwest and went to college in Montana- I think of “pocketbook” as one of those baffling words that books and old people insist are relevant but never factor into my life, right up there with “slacks” or “house coat.” Even though I know what people mean by pocketbook, my mental image is more like a day-planner, like Eliahna above.
In a weird note of synchronicity, I was just thinking yesterday at work how only customers from the South and New Jersey/New York area customers seem to mention their pocketbook when I ask them if they’ve got their payment information handy so we can get their cell phone bill taken care of. (I work at a customer service call center for a nationwide wireless provider.) Pretty much everyone else say it’s in the purse if they need to get it out of a bag-type object.
In my own vernacular, one goes shopping for purses but yells “where the heck did I put my bag?” when the purse ends up in a non-standard place.