I would not let an operator that did not have a card, carry my lunch basket or slide down my cellar door: not to say give him a "square" or fix him for a ride over the road. Google Books and Newspaperarchive turn up numerous hits, which don’t tail off until the 1930s or so. More generally, “You shan’t slide down my cellar door,” and the like were invoked to suggest childish truculence. In an 1896 letter to a friend, the poet Vaughan Moody wrote “Are n’t you going to speak to me again? Is my back-yard left irredeemably desolate? Have your rag dolls and your blue dishes said inexorable adieu to my cellar-door? The once melodious rain barrel answers hollow and despairing to my plaints….” In various forms, “slide down my cellar door” became a kind of catchphrase to suggest innocent friendship. Wingate and Petrie followed it up in the same year with an even more popular sequel, “I Don’t Want to Play in Your Yard,” which containted the phrase “You’ll be sorry when you see me sliding down our cellar door." The song figures a couple of times in the 1981 Warren Beatty movie Reds, most unforgettably as sung by Peggy Lee. Petrie in in 1894, in an age swilling in lachrymose sentimentality about childhood. "Playmates" was a big hit for Philip Wingate and Henry W. Could it have had to do with the song "Playmates," with its line "Shout down my rain barrel, slide down my cellar door"? There's no way to know for sure, but the dates correspond, and in fact those lines had an interesting life of their own… Cellar door is the same kind of thing, the expression people use to illustrate how civilization and literacy put the primitive sensory experience of language at a remove from conscious experience.īut that doesn't explain why the story emerged when it did. Lewis reported when he saw cellar door rendered as Selladore - lies the sudden falling away of the repressions imposed by orthography … to reveal what Dickens called "the romantic side of familiar things." … In the world of fantasy, that role is suggested literally in the form of a rabbit hole, a wardrobe, a brick wall at platform 9¾. …The undeniable charm of the story - the source of the enchantment that C. I posted on the phrase a few years ago (" The Romantic Side of Familiar Words"), suggesting that there was a reason why linguistic folklore fixed on that particular phrase, when you could make the same point with other pedestrian expressions like linoleum or oleomargarine: In a 2010 NYT “ On Language” column, Grant Barrett traced the claim that “cellar door” is the most beautiful phrase in English back as far as 1905 1903.
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