On 14 April 2000, Dick Lochte wrote:
: My guess is that it never had common usage before Hammett
put it into
: print. After that, everyone, like Hammett's editor and
publisher,
: assumed it meant someone who toted a gun. Certainly
moviegoers made
: that assumption. I think it was probably Ellery Queen, in
his/their
: magazine, who identified the original meaning in an
entertaining essay
: about the games Hammett played with obscure underworld
argot
: (gooseberry lay, etc.).
A while back Eddie Duggan gave me a copy of Erle Stanley
Gardner's article
"Getting Away with Murder," and I put up an excerpt at
http://www.miskatonic.org/gooseberry.html
which talks about "gunsel," "gooseberry lay" and so on. This
might be the bit you were thinking of.
Bill
-- William Denton : Toronto, Canada : http://www.miskatonic.org/ : Caveat lector.
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