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Thu 30 Mar, 2006 02:14 pm
I often hear on American TV programmes that someone who has "run away or taken off to avoid arrest for example" has "taken a powder"
What is the origin of this odd saying?
Hey, Don. I know the expression, but not the etymology. I'll check it out, Brit.
Gone off (diappeared) to the toilet?
Actually I don't think it is American slang.
I remember my friends and I "going for a powder" and that meant going to the loo. This referred to a couple generations or so ago of women who really did powder their noses in the ladies room. We have always used this phrase and I come from Ireland.
To take a powder - I've never really heard this used here (in Boston) but I wonder if it refers to the same generation where ladies and men, would leave the room and polite company, in order to go take their medicine (a powder?). And maybe it was extended to be used for absconding and/or not coming back? Not sure. That's just a guess.
I've just heard this on Law and Order SVU and the person who had "taken a powder was a man" if it was about ladies going to the bog why would it apply to men?
You know Heeven I cant look at your avatar without laughing, it's priceless
Well, I found this:
Phrase take a powder "scram, vanish," is from 1920, perhaps from the notion of taking a laxative medicine, so one has to leave in a hurry; or from a magician's magical powder, which made things disappear.
scram
1928, U.S. slang, either a shortened version of scramble: to leave quickly
I look this good in real life!
Letty wrote:Well, I found this:
Phrase take a powder "scram, vanish," is from 1920, perhaps from the notion of taking a laxative medicine, so one has to leave in a hurry; or from a magician's magical powder, which made things disappear.
scram
1928, U.S. slang, either a shortened version of scramble: to leave quickly
I never really thought how the word "scram" came about, Letty. Interesting.
A'right, a'right, I look at lot worse.
L.E. , there is also a German root to that expression but I lopped it off while trying to copy.<smile>
Hmmm...Answers com:
take a powder
Make a speedy departure, run away, as in I looked around and he was gone—he'd taken a powder. This slangy idiom may be derived from the British dialect sense of powder as “a sudden hurry,” a usage dating from about 1600. It may also allude to the explosive quality of gunpowder.
Letty wrote:Well, I found this:
Phrase take a powder "scram, vanish," is from 1920, perhaps from the notion of taking a laxative medicine, so one has to leave in a hurry; or from a magician's magical powder, which made things disappear.
scram
1928, U.S. slang, either a shortened version of scramble: to leave quickly
If thats true Letty I would never have guessed that
L.E. had it right, Don.
Here's the part that I lopped off:
1928, U.S. slang, either a shortened form of scramble (q.v.) or from Ger. schramm, imperative sing. of schrammen "depart."
Goody's Headache Powder used to use the slogan...
Got a headache? Take a powder!
maybe the expression came from the fact that this headache powder made the pain go away fast?
Today's version could mean ala Kate Moss' powder line sniff.
Chai Tea wrote:Goody's Headache Powder used to use the slogan...
Got a headache? Take a powder!
maybe the expression came from the fact that this headache powder made the pain go away fast?
This is what i learned a just a yungun . . . in the old South, headache "powders" were far more popular than aspirin pills, and Goody's is not the only brand (although i don't now recall the others, it being so many years). I heard the olf folks saying things to the effect of: "He answered the door and found one of those Jehovah's Witnesses there, so he just smiled and nodded, then he told her he had a headache somethin' awful, and he had to go take a powder." It was always used to signify an excuse to avoid unwanted company. I couldn't say how it got translated to mean someone who absconds, but i have heard that usage many times.
Here ya go, the old brain ain't dead yet . . . it was BC Powder, you always saw it right next to the Goody's, right there by the cash register.
That's right, BC was the one with that slogan!
I had disremembered that . . .
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