Here's an old-fashioned expression that came back to me for no reason at all tonight. My mother would always say, "That Jack (or whoever) is just a card!" if Jack was someone who was always coming up with some droll line or other.
I've just Googled "just a card" and find lots of references to card games, card counters and the like, but nothing about funny people who make other people laugh.
My mother lived in Ohio her entire life and probably learned to say that humorous people were "cards" in the 1930s and '40s.
Has anyone else ever heard this expression, and do you know its derivation?
Wordmatic
Posts: 1390 | Location: Near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA
Wordmatic, I have heard it too...though not for a long time. Of course I found it in Urban Dictionary, but you can never believe them. Here is a discussion on Quinion, though it doesn't seem to address the "real card" sense:
quote:
A card is certainly a very individual person, one who stands out from the crowd because he is odd or amusing, because of a clever or audacious nature or because he is one of a kind.
Though it doesn’t seem to have any connection with real card, an association does exist, through playing cards. Once that is assumed, a link with the joker might seem obvious, but — surprisingly — this playing card only entered the pack as an American invention around 1870, after card had already appeared.
Originally posted by Kalleh: Here is a discussion on Quinion, though it doesn't seem to address the "real card" sense:
I'm not sure what you mean. Real is just an intensifier in "real card." Here's what the Word Detective says:
quote:
Yuk yuk.
Dear Word Detective: I have heard the expression, "You're a card" many times. I understand its meaning but wondered how it came about and why. -- Christy, via the internet.
To call someone a "card" is to say that he (or she, although the term is usually applied to men) is a real "character," clever, audacious and funny. When "card" in this sense first appeared in the mid-19th century (the first three known uses are in works by Charles Dickens), the meaning was a bit broader, and could include someone with a notable peculiarity or eccentricity. The local curmudgeon, for instance, might be known as "an old card" or "a strange card."
When I first started looking into this sense of "card," I assumed that any connection to the "playing card" or "birthday card" sense of "card" must be rather remote, or possibly nonexistent. Shows what I know. The root of the word "card" is the Latin "charta," which meant "papyrus leaf," or (since papyrus was the source of early papermaking) "paper." Interestingly, when "card" was introduced in English (1400 A.D. or earlier), it specifically referred to playing cards, and "card" only came to be applied to "cardboard" material in general (and greeting cards by extension) several hundred years later.
Card games being as popular back then as they are today, "card" quickly spawned a slew of figurative phrases based on the role of certain cards in certain card games. "Cooling card," apparently a special card in some long-lost kind of card game, came to mean anything (or anyone) that dampens one's enthusiasm. A "wild card," which could stand in for any other card the player wished, came to be a metaphor, still used today, for any unpredictable factor (or person) in a given situation. A "sure card" came to mean anything that ensures success.
This use of various types of "cards" as metaphors to describe people eventually broadened, and by the time Dickens wrote his novel "Bleak House" in 1853, "card" was being used in its modern sense to mean an unusual or eccentric, often amusing, person.
Thanks for all of this. I see I didn't search far enough. I didn't even check the Urban Dictionary because I assumed, incorrectly, that it only contained more recent street slang, and this "card" one is pretty old. Very interesting. I'd say we're all just a bunch of cards around here and it's a phrase that ought to make a comeback.
Wordmatic
Posts: 1390 | Location: Near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA
