We’ve lived in 2 different places in Tübingen. Our “vacation apartment” (up those 59 steps, you may recall) was #23 on that street. Our current place is #23 as well – funny coincidence.

Anyway, when we were moving from one place to the other, the phrase 23 skidoo occurred to Chris. While both of us knew the phrase, we didn’t know what it was supposed to mean, nor where the phrase came from. So, of course, we looked it up on Wikipedia, and it turns out there is no agreement about what the origin of the phrase was. However, there are numerous, somewhat contradictory explanations, some quite detailed, about where it came from. There’s everything from women’s skirts getting blown up by the wind near the Flatiron Building in New York, to connections with bad luck  and connections to horse races. There are even connections to early musical comedies. The expression can mean have a good time, get out-of-town quick, or be a sly parody on the a scene in an early stage adaptation of Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, where Sidney Carlton dies his noble and tragic death at the guillotine, becoming #23 to be beheaded that day.  There’s even a connection to the inquiry about the sinking of the Titanic cited in the Wikipedia article.

In fact, according to the 1960 Dictionary of American slang, 23 skidoo is “perhaps the first truly national fad expression and one of the most popular fad expressions to appear in the U.S.”

Who knew that numerous stories exist, all claiming to be the “real” origin of the phrase 23 skidoo. How these things get into the dictionaries, books, etc. and then get accepted as fact is always a mystery to me. I guess people just like a good story, and even if the story proves false, the fictional version is too much fun to leave behind. To paraphrase Mark Twain, never let fact get in the way of a good story, eh?

I like it.

BTW, before I leave behind 23 skidoo, and skedaddle (a word which may or may not be related to skidoo), I’ll also do another little shameless promotion plug. Chris has a new series of digital artworks in his Revisualizing the Visual project. The new works are part of the CCalligraphy series; one of that series, Reality Distortion Field,  is his homage to Steve Jobs;  it’s the work that’s included in the art show in Syracuse that opens today. I’ve updated Chris’ Revisualizing the Visual project website to include the new works. You can check them out here: www.chrisculy.net. I bring this up because, in honor of the coincidence of our house numbers in Tübingen, one of his new works is entitled “23”.