Tootle of the Horn for MORTAL MUSIC

Stepping away from the usual slang-o-rama entry this week to let you all know that the latest book in my Silver Rush series, MORTAL MUSIC, is a finalist for a Colorado Independent Publishers Association (CIPA) award! I am thrilled, honored, excited, and dancing in the streets (with a mask on). You can find the complete list of finalists for the nearly 50 categories right here.

This year's CIPA EVVY Awards ceremony will broadcast virtually on September 10th.

Please join me as I break out the extra-special coffee to celebrate! Slang-o-rama will return next Wednesday, I promise.

   

Wednesday's Random Slang-o-rama (with an update!): Paint the town red

Hey hey! Get ready to have some fun, because we're gonna paint the town red! (Why? See my update at the bottom of this post.)

But... why red? Why not a nice shade of blue? And the whole town? Really?

Time to dig into this expression and see if we can identify what's going on behind the words...

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The American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms by Christine Ammer has been mighty handy lately. Here's what it says for this bit of slang:

paint the town red. Go on a spree... The precise allusion of this term is disputed. Some believe it refers to setting something on fire; others point to a vague association of the color red with violence. [late 1800s]

A disputed allusion? Late 1800s? (Yikes! Have I used that phrase in my books? And if I did, was I being anachronistic?) Well, let's dig a little more...

The Online Etymological Dictionary has a brief notation under the "paint" entry as follows:

To paint the town (red) "go on a spree" first recorded 1884

Uh oh. 
1884? 
Am I in trouble here? 
I turned to Ngram next (if you haven't come across Ngram before, it's a wonderful way to track the frequency of words and phrases in print over time). 

Eureka!... I found the following reference for "paint the town red" in a July 1882 publication: Historic Magazine and Notes and Queries for Teachers, Pupils, and Practical and Professional Men (N.B. Webster, editor).

What a relief! Finding this reference reassures me that this expression was in use before 1882—and in the West, at that. I am in the clear, and Inez is free to paint the town red, should she so desire!

...Where are they hiding the paintbrushes?
[Zogbaum, R. F. (illus).
New York. Harper's Weekly. 10-16- 1886.]

------------------UPDATE--------------------------------------------------

I'm leaving this post up for an extra week, because I definitely have reason to "paint the town red!"

Specifically, A DYING NOTE won two EVVY awards from the Colorado Independent Publishers Association:

• First place (gold) award in the Mystery/Crime/Detective Fiction category
• Second place (silver) award in the Historical Fiction category.

Mystery and history. Gold and silver. Definitely worth celebrating!

To view all the CIPA EVVY award winners, go here and scroll.

Wednesday's Random Slang-o-rama: Dressed to kill

Yessiree, I'm attending the awards banquet for the Colorado Independent Publishers Association's EVVY awards as a finalist for A DYING NOTE, so I'm going to gussy up, don my best authorly duds, and be a low-key version of "dressed to kill."

Hmmmm. Dressed to kill. If you take that at face value, wouldn't that mean dressing in all black throw-away clothes, or maybe something water/liquid-proof? Or maybe that's the mystery writer part of my mind musing. The historical writer part of my mind wonders when/how such a phrase came to mean to dress more... upscale, shall we say.

Time for research!

My first stop, The American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms by Christine Ammer, has this to say:

dressed to kill. Also, dressed to the nines. Elaborately attired... The first of these hyperbolic expressions dates from the early 1800s and uses kill in the sense of "to a great or impressive degree." The phrase to the nines in the sense of "superlative" dates from the late 1700s and its original meaning has been lost, but the most likely theory is that it alludes to the fact that nine, the highest single-digit numeral, stands for "best." 

 Well, that's pretty interesting. So, maybe the enthusiastic "You killed it!" uses kill in this old-time sense.

Second stop, the Online Etymological Dictionary. The entry "kill" has several definitions, including the one we mystery writers frequently employ ("to deprive of life, put to death"). At the very end is this:

... Dressed to kill first attested 1818 in a letter of Keats (compare killing (adj.) in the sense "overpowering, fascinating, attractive"). 

Of course, I had to check out "killing (adj.)" just to complete my journey:

killing (adj.) mid-15c., "deadly, depriving of life," present-participle adjective from kill (v.). Meaning "overpowering, fascinating, attractive" is 1630s, from the verb in a figurative sense "overwhelm (someone) by strong effect on the mind or senses." Meaning "very powerful in effect, exceedingly severe, so as to (almost) kill one" is from 1844.

So there you have it! I will report back on the award announcements, so stay tuned...

Now HERE is a woman "dressed to kill."
[Madame X (Madame Pierre Gautreau), by John Singer Sargent (American, Florence 1856–1925 London) (1856 - 1925) – ArtistDetails of artist on Google Art Project - 4QGaPNGLuGOBCw at Google Cultural Institute maximum zoom level, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=26126772]

Here-Hear! (A bit of news)

Interrupting the usual slang-o-rama schedule to warble some exciting developments about the latest book in my series....

A DYING NOTE is now out in audio, thanks to Blackstone Publishing and narrator par excellence Kirsten Potter (who has narrated other books in the Silver Rush series). You can find it on Downpour as well as on Audible. If you like audio books, please check it out! (Speaking of checking things out, your library might even carry it. And if not, well, you can always put in a request that they obtain it for their audiobook collection.)

My second bit of warbling is that A DYING NOTE is a finalist for a CIPA/EVVY Award! (CIPA/EVVY = Colorado Independent Publishers Association; EVVY = CIPA's founder Evelyn Kaye.) Winners (and 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and Merit finalists) will be announced August 25th in Denver. I'm still trying to decide at this point whether I can reasonably spring for a quick trip to Colorado to attend the awards banquet. I'm verrrrry tempted.