Posts tagged Loesser

“The earliest reference I can find is from the song ‘Sue Me, Sue Me’, in the musical ‘Guys and Dolls’. This was a Broadway show in 1950 and released as a film in 1955. This was composed by Frank Loesser and sung in the film version by Frank Sinatra (as Nathan Detroit) and Vivian Blaine (as Miss Adelaide):

Detroit: Serve a paper and sue me, sue me, what can you do me? I love you. Give a holler and hate me, hate me, go ahead, hate me. I love you.

Adelaide: When you wind up in jail, don’t come to me to bail you out.

Detroit: Alright already, so call a policeman. Alright already, it’s true, you knew, so sue me, sue me, what can you do me. I love you.

In the original stage version the line ‘you knew’ was given as ‘so nu’. Nu is a Yiddish word meaning (depending on who you ask) something like ‘what did you expect?’. This gives some weight to the suggestion that several American correspondents of mine have made - that the phrase is Yiddish and was in common use by Jewish men in New York prior to 1950. That would fit with the meaning of the line in the song. Loesser was Jewish, was born in and died in New York, and would certainly be familiar with ‘so nu’. ‘So nu, so sue’ is Loesser’s kind of rhyme and the jump to ‘so sue me’ being Yiddish isn’t a large one.”

http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/so-sue-me.html

Woody,

According to William Kennedy who wrote the forward to the Guys & Dolls book you lent me, gangsters in the forties and fifties prized their attire first and their lawyers in a close second.  One gangster prided himself on being brought up on charges over fifty times and never served a day in jail.  This, of course, was due to his excellent legal counsel.  These are hoodlums perpetrating the air of businessmen with pretensions of normalcy.

-isaac