stiff v. especially describing a music recording, to fail to sell well. Editorial Note: This sense of the verb is intransitive. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
stiff v. especially describing a music recording, to fail to sell well. Editorial Note: This sense of the verb is intransitive. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Louis in Reno, Nevada, grew up in Montreal, Canada, speaking Québécois French. His father was fond of saying j’aime vacher le matin, puis je prends mon temps, meaning “I like to loaf and take my time in the morning.” Vacher comes...
The Finnish verb kehrätä can mean “to spin thread” or “to purr like a cat.” This is part of a complete episode.
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I would guess this originated in Hollywood (as in the 1985 cite above or the MWCD11 example, “the movie stiffed at the box office”). Here’s an early cite for the general sense of “fail”:
1976 Craig Karpel Playboy “Failure Is Its Own Reward” in Dazed and Confused (1993) 40 I am here to say a few words about how everything has bombed, flunked, stiffed, flopped and otherwise gone down the tube.
So you say this just to tweak me for missing it in Merriam-Webster’s 11th edition? : )
Your guess is a good one; this is one of those areas where access to all the old LA trade rags would come in handy.
I did see that and had the same doubts about it you do. The temptation of fiddling with one’s own writing from the past is too great, as I well know.
I think you missed an example of “stiff out” from that 1972 piece in Phonograph Record:
Ben, you’re a cite-hunting machine. I’ve amended the 1972 quotation.
Another rockcrit cite from 1973… from Robert Christgau’s “Consumer Guide” review of Billy Joel’s The Piano Man (as it appears in his Rock Albums of the ‘70s (searchable on Amazon):
The original CG review from the Village Voice has not yet been posted to Christgau’s website, so it’s possible that this was subsequently edited for the record guide (published in 1981).