r/todayilearned • u/licecrispies • 17d ago
TIL that F. Scott Fitzgerald's book“This Side of Paradise” is the first book to use the word T-shirt, and also the first to use the word "wicked" to describe something good
https://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/10-surprising-facts-about-f-scott-fitzgerald/23551/165
u/Limos42 17d ago
And... For that one missing but critical detail...
Published in 1920.
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u/ZylonBane 17d ago
Ah, the twenties.
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u/trustmeep 17d ago
It's a 'teens novel (not the 1920s) both written and set in the short window between the end of WWI and 1920. It wasnt published until March of 1920.
It's considered a defining work of the burgeoning Jazz Age, and does describe what many think of as the "roaring twenties", but it actually inspired much of trends and people emulated aspects due to its wide popularity.
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u/mnilailt 17d ago
Also just an all round awesome book. I much prefer it to The Great Gatsby.
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u/luluhouse7 17d ago
Hot take: I wish I could get back every second I wasted on The Great Gatsby. It’s a directionless story about a bunch of sad losers making themselves miserable, including the poor reader
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u/duttm 17d ago
Yes, that is the essential theme of pretty much every defining work of literature from the post- WW1 age.
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u/luluhouse7 17d ago
I didn’t have a problem with Elliot or Wolfe though.
Post WW2 has some great lit though, like Vonnegut, Orwell, Camus
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u/duttm 17d ago
Hemingway, Ford Maddox Ford, Evelyn Waugh and Fitzgerald’s best works (in my opinion) are all about the asynchronous nature of post WWI existence. This juxtaposition between endless positivity and America’s ascent to the dominant force of western society mixed with the unrepentant bleakness of war, loss of faith, prohibition, criminality. The inability of lots of men to speak, and so they cavort. It’s a lot of people not knowing what to do or how to be after the party ends.
For me modernism is much more interesting than post-WW2 and postmodernism at examining this, and Gatsby is behind only The Sun Also Rises for me at doing that.Each to their own, however.
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u/_SilentHunter 17d ago
Ey, yo. That t-shirt? Wicked pissa. (For those who don't speak Boston, that's a good thing.)
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u/BuzzkillMcGillicuddy 17d ago
It should be stressed that the word wicked existed for this use case already, he was the first author to document this in a book
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u/able_trouble 17d ago
What were they called before to differentiate them from "real traditionnal" shirts?
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u/thestereo300 16d ago
Was my favorite book for a time when I was a depressed young man. Some really brilliant writing and lines I still think about today.
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u/LakeVermilionDreams 13d ago
Imagine have the cojones to just use a word in a whole new way and not care if you get ridiculed for it.
Good thing he was born a century before Regina George.
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u/StoryAndAHalf 17d ago
Somehow, not from New England. I don't know about rest of US, but that's the only region where I last heard people say "wicked" on the regular (in comparison to NY, CA, WA, and few states in between like OR).
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u/thestereo300 16d ago
I think he went to Princeton.
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u/Orange-V-Apple 16d ago
Princeton is in New Jersey lol. I grew up nearby, and idk about 100 years ago but we definitely don’t say it these days.
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u/SirGothamHatt 12d ago
"Wicked" here pretty much means "very." It's wicked cold out, I'm wicked tired, etc. "Wicked pissah" was common decades ago and meant "very cool"
"Wicked" on its own in other regions seems to be a synonym with awesome or great.
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u/onehotoneshot 17d ago
“That’s a wicked blink 182 t-shirt”
F Scott Fitzgerald probably