It's Only Words......

Back in England, and in the long ago when song lyrics were finely crafted poetry rather than repetitious two-line chants, on occasion, listening to songs from the USA, I'd come across one or two words "foreign" to me.

#1 Carousel was a favourite movie back then. In The Soliloquy from that musical there was one mystery:

You can have fun with a son
But you gotta be a father to a girl
She mightn't be so bad at that
A kid with ribbons in her hair!
A kind o' sweet and petite
Little tintype of her mother!
What a pair!

Tintype?

I assumed from the context that this was some kind of mirror image. It was many decades later that, wandering around antique stores in the USA, I found out exactly what a tintype is. I suppose they had tintypes in England too, but I wasn't aware of them.

Tintype, also melainotype and ferrotype, is a photograph made by creating a direct positive on a sheet of iron metal that is blackened by painting, lacquering or enamelling and is used as a support for a collodion photographic emulsion.
Photographers usually worked outside at fairs, carnivals etc. and as the support of the tintype (there is no actual tin used) is resilient and does not need drying, photographs can be produced only a few minutes after the picture is taken. (Wikipedia)

A couple of tintypes from among husband's collection of vintage photographs - these girls could be exactly what the song lyrics described!

#2 From the movie Easter Parade:

"On the Avenue...Fifth Avenue...
The photographers will snap us...
And you'll find that you're...
In the rotogravure"

Rotogravure? I had no idea, and in those days no handy Google to enlighten me. I've since discovered that when Easter Parade was written, rotogravure was a method of printing used to print photographs in newspapers. Sunday editions would often have a section dedicated to photographs and known as the roto or rotogravure section. So, "you’ll find that you’re in the rotogravure ..." means that your photograph would appear in the rotogravure section, because you'd be interesting enough to report about...

I found these via Google - vintage rotogravure sections. The first features one rather scary photograph, top left, of Klanswomen, the second features more benign subject matter!

#3 Little Deuce Coupe (Beach Boys' song)

I thought at first it was something to do with ice cream - but no. It was a car.
The deuce coupe was a 1932 Ford coupe - called a "deuce" because of the "two" in 1932. A coupe style car in general featured a closed body style with permanently fixed top, usually a two-door car with two front seats and a luggage compartment.

If I'd seen the album cover, or listened more closely to the lyrics, I'd have been less puzzled:

Little deuce Coupe
You don't know what I got
Little deuce Coupe
You don't know what I got

Well I'm not braggin' babe so don't put me down
But I've got the fastest set of wheels in town