Vineland TV Guide

[Dave Monroe]

On Tue, Jan 6, 2009 at 11:19 PM, John Bailey <sundayjb at gmail.com> wrote:

> The Lobster Trick Movie - I have no idea what that means

lobster trick/shift

David Brown wrote:

I've heard the phrase "turning the lobster trick" used to describe
working the night shift for a newspaper, but have no idea where it
came from. I believe the phrase originated in the 1930s, but finding
out what lobsters have to do with working late just escapes me.
Lobster trick is indeed a journalistic slang term, and a U.S. coinage.
I haven't found evidence of turning used with the expression--perhaps
there's some conflation with "turning a trick" (as prostitutes do)
going on in the phrase as you've heard it.

The first citation we've found is from the journal American Speech in
1927: "'Sunrise watch' and 'lobster trick' are among the names applied
on papers...to the force which occupies the office in the very early
morning interval afer the last regular morning edition has gone to
press..." By 1942, the variant lobster shift appeared, and this is the
more prevalent form today. It's usually applied to the midnight-to-8
a.m. shift, but the times can vary.

The citation shows that the phrase was already well in use by the time
it was recorded. I thought the expression might have had to do with
the time that fishermen check their lobster pots, but Jonathan David,
in his Dictionary of Popular Slang (1980), says that this comes from
the 'idiot, fool, dupe' sense of lobster: "...one who would work those
hours is a fool."

The 'dupe' meaning of lobster is also an Americanism: "Anybody could
see that you, Thorpey, me boy, could make a lobster out of Holmes"
(Stephen Crane, New York City Sketches, 1894). I can't find evidence
of a direct connection, but I think this may have its origins in
American contempt for defeated British soldiers.

It's not as much of a stretch as you might think. The use of the term
lobster to mean 'a British soldier' originates in the appellation that
arose for the heavily armored cavalry soldiers in one of the regiments
in Oliver Cromwell's army. There's a 1642 citation stating that the
nickname was being "misapplied to soldiers," which shows that it moved
pretty quickly from referring to armored cavalry to regular soldiers,
and then of course to the famously red-coated soldiers who were
defeated in America's Revolutionary War, who were still referred to as
lobsters until early in the 20th century.

However, this connection is more likely to be a product of my fertile
imagination. There's a New Jersey dialectal term lobscouse recorded in
the 1985 edition of Dialect Notes that is reported as meaning 'awkward
person, lummox', and other citations of lobster meaning the same, all
from the Northeast.

http://www.randomhouse.com/wotd/index.pperl?date=20000724