A night at the theater

You know how stuff you hear from childhood sticks with you all your life? Like the first time you hear that pickles are shrivelly cucumbers and raisins used to be grapes, and the startling realization that your parents know, and once used, the same off-color words you think someone just made up...

I was ten when the Civil War Centennial started. You Dixie-fried readers know that struggle as the War Of Northern Aggression. But just after it ended, a disappointed Confederate sympathizer shot Abraham Lincoln to death while the 16th president enjoyed an evening at Ford's Theater.

Well, at least he enjoyed it up until John Wilkes Booth cunningly slipped past a missing drunken guard to enter the presidential loge and fire his Derringer.


The play that evening at Ford's starred Laura Keene (an English actress whose real name was Mary Frances Moss) in "Our American Cousin," a comedy about uncouth Americans. As an actor himself, Booth had seen the play, and knew exactly what the big laugh-getting line was.

I heard about this as a kid and it's one of the factoids that lodged itself in my noggin, along with Chuck Estrada's pitching record for 1960 (18-11, with a 3.58 ERA) and the formula for water (two atoms of hydrogen in a molecule of water).
The laugh-getter was when Asa Trenchard says this to Mrs. Mountchessington:

Don't know the manners of good society, eh? Well, I guess I know enough to turn you inside out, old gal — you sockdologizing old man-trap.

I suppose I had other things to do, but it took a few years before I found time to find out what "sockdologizing" means. (I knew what a man-trap was, having seen plenty of Katharine Hepburn movies.)

"Sockdolager" was a word that came to our language in the early 1800s, combining "sock" for a knockout blow and a mangled form of "doxology," which is the word for the final part of a hymn. "Sockdolager," meaning an exceptionally crushing punch effect, was then boiled down a little more by Tom Taylor, the playwright behind "Our American Cousin," to mean that the character toward whom the word was lobbed was an overwhelming force. That's what linguists call a nonce word, a word made up for just one occasion.

If that was the funniest line in the play, the whole audience must have been out cold when it was said, and Booth's plan was to fire his pistol while the audience convulsed over it. Then, in true theatrical fashion, he jumped off the balcony, shouting  “Sic semper tyrannis!” (“Thus ever to tyrants!”– then, as now, the Virginia state motto).

But, in non-theatrical fashion, Booth caught his spur on the American flag bunting draped over the president's box, and landed so awkwardly on the stage that he broke his leg and limped off to ride away on his horse.

154 years later, America still mixes show business with politics, and still with disastrous effect. But at least we know a sockdolager when we see one now!