[Editors] soup and fish

[Amy B. Donovan]

My British lab member sent me a great explanation, check the link below for 
a great write up of soup and fish:


>Heres the answer:
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><http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-sou2.htm>http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-sou2.htm
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Test of the link:

[Q] From Lee-Ann Nelson: I am baffled by an expression from P G Wodehouse. 
Bertie puts on his soup and fish. Can you explain this?

[A] I can. The soup and fish is a mans evening dress, dinner suit, or dress 
suit, though I should really instead refer to it as a tuxedo, since despite 
Bertie Woosters mainly London milieu the phrase seems to be natively American.

Until I went delving in old US newspapers, I thought that Wodehouse had 
invented it. Indeed, the OED gives him the credit for its first use, in 
Piccadilly Jim in 1918: He took me to supper at some swell joint where they 
all had the soup-and-fish on but me. I felt like a dirty deuce in a clean 
deck.But there are earlier examples, such as this from The Atlanta 
Constitution of November 1914, in a report about local kids being given a 
slap-up meal by the Rotary Club: Theres going to be no fess upbusiness; no 
soup and fishoutfits. Itll be just a good dinner.

But why soup and fish? Well, one dons these duds for a special occasion 
such as a formal meal. This is likely to be a heavyweight event, with many 
courses, starting with soup and followed by fish before one gets to the 
main event of the meat course. So the soup-and-fish is what one wears to 
consume the soup and fish.

Incidentally, one of the more delightful aspects of hunting down this kind 
of language is that sometimes you get more than you were expecting. The 
Grand Rapids Tribune in February 1915 included this: After donning the 
complete Soup and Fish known in swozzey circles as Thirteen and the Odd, he 
didnt look as much like a waiter as one might have supposed.Thirteen and 
the Odd? There are other examples to be found, though only a few. Jonathon 
Green notes in the Cassells Dictionary of Slang that it is long-obsolete 
slang for a tail-coat, as worn with the full fig of white tie and tails, 
but says that its origin is unknown. Well, did you ever?
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