…BEING A CONTINUATION OF THE POSTS ON MASS, MESS, AND THEIR KIN
By Anatoly Liberman
Mash has nothing to do with mass or mess, but it sounds like them, and since I have been meaning to write about masher ‘lady killer, etc.’ for a long time (see the last sentence of the previous post), I decided that this is the proper moment to do so. Some of our best dictionaries say that the origin of masher is unknown. However, if we disregard a few insupportable conjectures, the conclusion at which we will arrive won’t surprise anyone: masher is mash plus -er. Only mash poses problems. Masher enjoyed tremendous popularity during the last two decades of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, before it more or less faded from people’s memory. However, those who read old books will have no trouble recognizing the word: it crops up in the literature of the late Victorian era, in American novels written before World War I (this is where I first saw it), and in such popular British publications as Punch’s Almanac, The Daily News, The Sporting Times, The Weekly Dispatch, and The Illustrated London News, among others. The Piccadilly Masher was the title of a popular music hall song of the day. While comparing swell, dandy, beau, and such nice synonyms for “a flamboyant man about town” as Corinthian and macaroni, all designating approximately the same type of person, knowledgeable correspondents to magazines said the following in 1882 (the year, in which, according to the OED, the word was very much in vogue, though, as Stephen Goranson has pointed out, it had some currency already in 1871):
“A masher is usually a ‘swell’, but every swell is not a masher. To be ‘awfully mashed on’ a young woman is equivalent… to being ‘terrible spoons’ or ‘very hard hit’. The masher proper is a young gentleman… who, having become a devout adorer of some fair actress, nightly frequents the house where she is engaged, that he may feast his eyes upon her beauty.”
The adoring youth, we are told, becomes the actress’s mash, “like the favorite food of a highly-fed horse.” Thus, to be mashed means ‘to be dead nuts on’ or ‘hotly in love with’ a girl. This is the passive. In the active voice, to mash is ‘to make a girl dead nuts on oneself’. I have something to say about going nuts and about nuts and spoons as participants in the amorous game but will say it another time.
The condemnation of highbrows was unanimous: this barbarous addition to our slang, this precious contribution to our vocabulary, a detestable cant word, this horrible word in common and certainly vulgar use, and so forth, but in retrospect (in 1943, when one would have thought there were more pressing things to discuss) mash, masher, and mashing, the admission came that “ugly as [they] were, [they] expressed shades of meaning hard to replace exactly by more elegant equivalents” (this is of course why slang exists!) “the masher was thought of as well dressed, and offensive, but extreme villainy was not impute