86

[Dave Monroe]

Er, I did post that Webster's def., "86" = "nix." 
That doesn't cover it?  But one thing I DIDN'T do in
my waste-making haste to post was to post, say, other
instances from Those Pynchonian Texts, e.g. ...

   "'Yep.  You in some trouble, Zoyd?'
   "'Moon darlin', when am I out of it?  He mention
where he was staying, anything like that?'
   "'Mostly just starin' at the Tube in the bar.  Some
movie on channel 86....'" (Vineland, p. 41)

"When truly disturbing catastrophes do occur and
disrupt the ordinary TV program, the events are
compulsively repeated. Patricia Mellencamp mentions
the Zapruder movie of Kennedy's assassination and the
footage of the exploding Challenger capsule as
examples of television's compulsion to repeat. Similar
to Zoyd's crazy stunt, each further repetition turns
the event into a mere optical spectacle which seems
under control so as long as it is constantly repeated.
The repetition generates a feeling of continuity and
control when a violent split has occurred: 'Dadurch
werden die Schreckensminuten zur Fiktion und können
bewältigt werden.' With its inability to provide
context (i.e. to represent events in their whole
historical complexity) and its compulsion to repeat
'verhält sich [TV] wie die Opfer der traumatischen
Neurose, die Sigmund Freud als Beispiel zur
Beschreibung des Wiederholungszwanges [...]
verwendet.' The event which is not fully confronted
but only repeated on TV is obliterated. It is no
coincidence that Zoyd's jump is rerun on Channel 86
(to get '86ed' is an American slang expression for
being eradiacted)."

http://home.foni.net/~vhummel/Image-Fiction/chapter_4.2.2.html


--- Don Corathers <crawdad at one.net> wrote:
> 
> Arthur:
> 
> > unconsciously, that Dave Monroe failed to note
> > that to 86 is to kill, destroy, annhilate. Either
> > way or no
> 
> I don 't have my 40 pounds of slang dictionaries at
> hand to confirm this, but it's my recollection
> that "86" is thought to have originated in
> restaurant kitchens. When the kitchen ran out of a
> special or menu item on a busy evening, the wait
> staff would be told to "86 the Parsnip Surprise" or
> whatever, meaning to stop taking orders for it....

Another thing I didn't do was the legwork ...

86, eighty-six - To throw someone out; to ban or bar
someone. To get rid of something, to throw out. Ditch,
dispose of, drop. For some, "to 86" also means "to
kill" or "to murder." At the provided website:
"(Extracted from the alt.English.usage FAQ maintained
by Mark Israel): eighty-six =nix. This verb meaning to
eject or debar from premises, to reject or abandon was
previously an expression used by waiters and
bartenders indicating that the supply of an item was
exhausted or that a customer was not to be served."
Cf. 386: "Why don't you go pound sand up your ass?"
(Eighty-six or 86 is common slang. Thanks to Mark B
for 386, origin unknown. In some circles, 832 is used
instead of 386.)

http://www.alt-usage-english.org/excerpts/fxeighty.html
http://www.quinion.com/words/qa/qa-eig1.htm
http://home.t-online.de/home/toni.goeller/idiom_wm/idioms191.html
http://www.takeourword.com/Issue014.html
http://plateaupress.com.au/wfw/eightysix.htm
http://cgi.sainet.or.jp/~daisan/slang.html
http://www.lvrj.com/lvrj_home/1999/Aug-18-Wed-1999/lifestyles/11767372.html
http://www.m-w.com/wftw/98sep/090398.htm
http://www.bartleby.com/61/7/E0060700.html
http://www.restaurantreport.com/qa/86d.html
http://www.keeslau.com/TomWaitsSupplement/Lyrics/LyricsLexicon/
http://www.wordwithyou.com/archives/awwy_index.html

See ...

http://www.pseudodictionary.com/search.php?letter=numbers&browsestart=40

But ...

There are other explanations: that it derives from
British merchant shipping, in which the standard crew
was 85, so that the 86th man was left behind; that 86
was the number of the American law that forbade
bartenders to serve anyone who was drunk (stories
disagree about which state it had been enacted in);
that a fashionable New York restaurant only had 85
tables, so the eighty-sixth was the one you gave to
somebody you didn't want to serve; or that a
restaurant (usually said to be in New York) had an
especially popular item as number 86 on the menu, so
that it frequently ran out. All but the last send my
bullshit detector into overload. 

Another explanation frequently given relates the
expression to the strengths of spirits served in bars.
It is said that these were normally 100 degrees proof
but that when a customer was getting over-heated they
served instead a weaker brew that was only 86 degrees
proof. However, nobody so far as I know has yet
produced even halfway convincing evidence that this
the origin. 

[...]

Whatever its origin, it does seem that eighty-six was
first used in restaurants and bars, either in the late
1920s or early 1930s; the first firmly attested source
is in the journal American Speech for February 1936;
another example may be from the mid 1920s - the date
is uncertain - which would rule out Chumley's, as it
didn't open until 1927. The original sense was that
the establishment had run out of some item on the
menu. 

The Oxford English Dictionary suggests it may have
been rhyming slang for nix, which seems plausible.
Although it's often thought of as typically American,
nix actually entered the language in the latter part
of the eighteenth century in Britain; it was borrowed
from a version of the German nichts, nothing. But it
seems that eighty-six was created as rhyming slang in
the United States. 

The sense that indicated a patron was not to be served
because he was drunk or obnoxious appeared later (the
first written example is only from 1943); the verb
meaning to discard or get rid of something is even
more recent, from the 1950s. 

Many people quote other examples of number slang used
by hard-pressed servers [...].  Presumably some of
these related to the numbering on a standard menu
somewhere at some time, but the details have been
lost. 

http://www.quinion.com/words/qa/qa-eig1.htm

SYLLABICATION: eight·y-six 
PRONUNCIATION: t-sks 
VARIANT FORMS: or 86 
TRANSITIVE VERB: Inflected forms: eight·y-sixed or
86·ed, eight·y-six·ing or 86·ing, eight·y-six·es or
86·es
Slang 1. To refuse to serve (an unwelcome customer) at
a bar or restaurant. 2a. To throw out; eject. b. To
throw away; discard.  
ETYMOLOGY: Perhaps after Chumley's bar and restaurant
at 86 Bedford Street in Greenwich Village, New York
City.

http://www.bartleby.com/61/7/E0060700.html

Not to mention ...

http://www.86ed.com/

http://www.laurascadden.com/86.htm

So I won't ...

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