12. How Americans talked to each other
Films provide an audible, as well as visible, record of communications, since the advent of “talkies” in the late 1920s. Words once in common usage became lost to the language over time, and movies from bygone eras provide evidence they existed. Other words entered the English language because of films, including flicks, movies, and Hollywood, originally known as Hollywoodland. From films, we learn that during the 1930s and forties detectives were known as tecs, dicks, and gumshoes. The police in general were known as coppers, later shortened to cops. Women, in the non-politically correct atmosphere of previous eras, were called dames, babes, tomatoes, and other terms considered pejorative and unacceptable today.
Gangster films and mysteries from the 1940s tell succeeding generations of the term bum rap. Cheesy meant cheap, gas meant a good time, and lettuce referred to paper money. Baseball movies of the 1940s referred to arguments on the field as rhubarbs, later extended to arguments of any kind. The 1950s presented many films featuring the hot rods, popular among teens during the era, and the burn-outs they executed. Burn-out later evolved into meaning losing interest in something, reflected in films of later eras. Nerd, a term most people associate with a later era, is heard in some 1950s films, particularly among young people, used in the same context as in the 21st century.