1354 Handlin’ Pans

Sometimes the meanings and origins of words are obscure. The other day I used the term “blue” to describe a bit of literature that was a tad raunchy. I said it was a “little blue.” The person I said it to had never heard that description.
Maybe it’s falling out of favor. “Cursing a blue streak” has been replaced by people from blue states. Or feeling the blues. So to clarify: At one time, “blue” humor was what you’d expect from late-night comics in Las Vegas.
I recently had someone ask me where the word “panhandler” comes from. So I looked it up in the online etymology dictionary. It said the word “panhandle,” as a geographic description, goes back to 1856, to describe part of Virginia. Funny, I’ve never heard of the Virginia panhandle.
Most of us unimaginative folks, looking at states that supposedly have panhandles, including West Virginia, Florida, Alaska, Idaho, Texas and Oklahoma, would agree Oklahoma is the most panhandly of them all.
Interestingly, the term “panhandler,” meaning beggar, goes even further back, to 1849, perhaps, as the etymology dictionary speculates, “from the act of holding out ones arm like the handle of a pan.”
I don’t know. I don’t think the term “panhandler” really caught on until a bunch of them came west after the dust bowl. It was the Grapes-of-Wrath folks escaping the drought and depression that really brought begging up to national proportions. And they were from where? The Oklahoma “panhandle.” Ergo, they were “panhandlers.” Dumb hicks were known as okeys and poor beggars without a social safety net were called panhandlers.
Panhandlers also used blue language.
Funny…Oklahoma isn’t a blue state.
But many Oklahomans have dogs named Blue.
I wonder what that means...
America, ya gotta love it.