Catching Idle Butterflies

Others do it, so no complaints from the peanut gallery

As I wrote the title above I thought, “Where the heck did the term ‘peanut gallery’ come from?”

Using Mozilla’s Firefox browser (I’m tired of Internet Explorer. It takes up far too many resources and is much slower than Firefox), I typed in “peanut gallery” into the website address box. It took me to a website called World Wide Words – Michael Quinion writes on international English from a British viewpoint.
( http://www.worldwidewords.org )

This is what it said:

[Q] From Steve Klimback: “May I please ask what is the origin of the phrase peanut gallery in the context: ‘That is enough from the peanut gallery’. The only mildly plausible origin I could guess was in relation to a section of seats sold at plays.”

[A] It does have a theatrical origin, and goes back to America at the end of last century. The peanut gallery was the topmost tier of seats, the cheapest in the house, a long way from the stage. The same seats in British theatres were (and still are) often called “the gods” because you were so high you seemed to be halfway to heaven, up there with the allegorical figures that were often painted on the ceiling. On both sides of the Atlantic, these seats attracted an impecunious class of patron, with a strong sense of community, often highly irreverent and with a well-developed ability to heckle, hence the modern figurative meaning. A significant difference between the American and British theatres is that American patrons ate peanuts; these made wonderful missiles for showing their opinion of artistes they didn’t like.

Most Americans of a certain age will know the phrase because it was used in a slightly different sense in the fifties children’s television programme, the Howdy Doody Show. There it was the name for the ground-level seating for the kids, the “peanuts”, though the phrase was almost certainly derived from the older sense. They were just as noisy and irreverent as their theatrical forebears, or indeed the groundlings of Shakespeare’s time, with a liking for low humour and a total lack of sense or discrimination.

I typed that title originally because I intended to be lazy, and copy and paste portions of my earlier entries into this one. Since others have done it in their blogs, I wanted no complaining.

I saved more of my entries last night, and I have to admit most were good. A few even made me laugh. Most made me think, or in this case, re-think.

One entry stood out to me: "Updates and Personal Journeys" . In it I talked about the importance of keeping a record of my life, specifically my point of view of world-changing events such as wars and natural disasters. I summed it up in one paragraph:

As we go through life, as we live it, we don’t normally see the historical importance, not just to our family's succeeding generations, but to all who come after. History books rarely convey the beauty, the horror; the raw emotions of living through great and terrible events. Children are left with mere when, why, and how things happened. They are the facts without the experiences, and the chances of those events ‘sticking’ with them are lessened.

It reminded me I haven’t been doing that. I’ve kept my journals focused on my internal and personal life, saying little to nothing about my take on national and world events.

This doesn’t mean I will start, but it gives me something to think about, especially, like today, when I can’t think of anything else to write about. With information about what’s going on around the world at any time so easy to access, I should not be intimidated by the blinking cursor on a blank screen, or sweat over my pen hovering above a clean sheet of paper.