The Wizard of Oz

Allan Woolf hadn’t received a screen credit for nearly five years, though he’d kept active rewriting the works of others sans billing.

Vocabulary Scarecrow sings: “I could be another Lincoln” – a reference to our 16th president, true, but your students may not know how revered he was by Midwesterners in particular as late as 1900, when Baum wrote this book.

I’ve suddenly twigged/made saps out of us/time we boughed out – L. Frank Baum was quite a fan of puns, and would probably love these bad ones about the Ozian apple trees. He once asked his family why heaven was like his son Henry’s hair? The answer was that “there is no parting there.”

Heavenly semaphores – The Lion hears beautiful singing coming from the Emerald City, but rather than call it the music of the heavenly spheres, he comes up with semaphores.

Jiminy crickets - J.W. Hiebert, in his online essay “Christian Cursing,” tells us that “Jiminy Crickets has been used by many [Christian] people, however, it is . . . a euphemistic expression of Jesus Christ. It is just a way to try to exchange acceptable words with which to euphemistically use our Lord’s name lightly. It is an interjection.”

Caliginous - Webster’s says, “dark and gloomy.” The Wizard is simply indulging in some alliteration, which is, of course, the repetition of a consonant sound at the beginning of two or more words in a phrase or sentence; a tongue twister is an extreme example of alliteration. The Tinman isn’t really dark and gloomy, but it sounds good, doesn’t it?

Bovine fodder - literally, cow food, the straw the Scarecrow is stuffed with. This is another Wizard putdown.

Whippersnapper - Again we turn to Webster: “an insignificant, often impudent [that is, smart mouth] person.”

Mellifluous baggage (the Wizard calls Dorothy this) - “flowing with sweetness or honey, smooth and sweet” is what mellifluous means, but baggage is another put-down: “an impudent [there’s that word again!] or saucy girl or woman.” Are you getting the feeling that the Wizard is trying to sound important and intellectual, but he is neither?

Simian minion - The Wicked Witch calls the captain of the flying monkeys, Nikko, her “monkey assistant”: simian = ape and minion = subordinate officer.

Flibberty-gibbet - “a silly, scatterbrained person.”

Fly-by-Night - “Fly-by-night was originally an ancient term of reproach to an old woman, signifying she is a witch, according to Grose’s Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue. From a witch flying about at night on a broom, the term was applied, at the beginning of the 19th century, to anyone who flies hurriedly from a recent activity, usually a business activity and usually at night –someone who is a swindler and whose activities are fraudulent,” our friends at The Phrase Finder say.

Jitterbug - In The Wizard of Oz this insect is something that can inflict humans but it’s merely a personification of a lively dance from the 1930s, “a strenuous dance performed to quick-tempo jazz or swing music and having various two-step patterns embellished with twirls and sometimes acrobatic maneuvers.”

Yip Harburg and Harold Arlen originally wrote this dance number because the Wicked Witch of the West