Are We Talking Love?
She said I need too much.
Too much what?
Did she have enough of it to give?
What if I do need too much of it,
whatever it is?
I'll take what I can get
like everybody else
who doesn't have a choice.
What else can I do?
Forsaking measurements
which I never took,
supposing love,
I must use:
pulses, flutters, feather thoughts,
sighs and glances, brownie points,
feelies, trembles and other yeses,
and if there's still time to kill,
let the need die
unsatisfied.
Net Weight -- Jean-Michel Basquiat
She said I need too much.
Too much what?
Did she have enough of it to give?
What if I do need too much of it,
whatever it is?
I'll take what I can get
like everybody else
who doesn't have a choice.
What else can I do?
Forsaking measurements
which I never took,
supposing love,
I must use:
pulses, flutters, feather thoughts,
sighs and glances, brownie points,
feelies, trembles and other yeses,
and if there's still time to kill,
let the need die
unsatisfied.
Net Weight -- Jean-Michel Basquiat
A man was quoted in the “Los Angeles Times’ in 1951 of earning favor with his wife in terms of getting “brownie points,” but the origin of the phrase is not clear. It may have derived from the practice of the Brownies (the youngest category of Girl Scouts/Girl Guides, named after Juliana Horatio Ewing’s 1865 story “The Brownies” which posited that children could either be helpful brownies or lazy boggarts) who can earn points or merit badges for doing good deeds. In addition, in the US after World War II local stores issued “brown stamps” with purchases; these could be collected and eventually redeemed for household gifts. In the 1930s the Curtis Publishing Company, which put out such popular magazines as “Ladies Home Journal,” “The Saturday Evening Post,” “The American Home,” “Country Gentleman,” and “Jack & Jill,” paid its distributors (primarily young boys) a small commission but also colored vouchers if sales targets were met, and these could be redeemed for goods in the company’s catalogue; five “greenies” equaled one “brownie.” In the 1940s American G.I. slang for sycophants was “brown nosers” (i.e., “ass kissers” who acquire shitbrown probosces from their obsequiousness), and it has been conjectured that “brownie” could have been a less offensive form of the term. In addition, in 1886 George R. Brown, a superintendent on the Fall Brook Railway in New York, devised a system of employee merits and demerits (i.e., “brownie points”). Whatever its origin, the phrase refers to a hypothetical social currency which can be acquired by earning favor in the eyes of another, especially one's superior.
ReplyDeleteA feelie is the result of “copping a feel,” i.e., the clandestine fondling of a woman’s breasts or buttocks. The expression “cop a feel” dates to 1935. To cop, meaning to capture, seize, or grab, was a variant of “cap” (to arrest), recorded as early as 1589 and was borrowed from the Middle French “caper” (to seize) and ultimately from the Latin “capere” (to take).