Joints and popsicles
Since I left Substack this week, I was thinking about expressions people use when they’re leaving a place, and I landed on “let’s blow this popsicle stand” as a particularly puzzling one. Why does “blow” mean “leave”? Where are all these popsicle stands and why are people leaving them?
This expression is primarily used by US speakers and it originates in the 20th century as “let’s blow this joint.” The OED does list depart, leave, or vacate, especially suddenly, as meanings of “blow,” and it’s right after “blow in” meaning to arrive suddenly, so I guess there is a sense of being carried by the wind. Or possibly in the case of “let’s blow this joint,” a sense of… explosions? I think as a kid, I heard this phrase and had no idea what it meant, so I understood “blow” as “blow up.” You would vacate a place pretty suddenly if it blew up.
“Joint” is also chiefly US, and it means a gathering place, perhaps especially a place where you might do something illicit like drink or smoke opium. It’s a much older word than I would have thought; the OED’s first citation is from 1821.
“Let’s blow this joint” becomes “let’s blow this pop stand,” where “pop” means a sweet carbonated beverage.
A pop stand is a soda fountain; a soda fountain is a machine that mixes carbonated water and flavored syrup, but in the mid-20th century, it was also a name for the kind of establishment where you might find such a machine, like a diner or an ice cream parlor or a drugstore. This is a much more wholesome image than “joint,” since a pop stand would not be serving alcohol. Still, though, it might be a gathering place for teens—trouble for the non-teens among us—and a pop stand might also be the kind of place teens would want to leave in search of somewhere cooler.
But there aren’t too many pop stands around these days and “pop” is a regional usage, anyway. Lots of people in the United States say “soda.” So for many speakers, “pop stand” doesn’t mean much. At least, that’s how I’m choosing to explain to myself that we have collectively switched “pop stand” to “popsicle stand.” I’ve never seen a popsicle stand, but the term makes me imagine something like a lemonade stand: roadside, rinky-dink, not somewhere you stick around.
Anyway, here’s to taking our popsicles and moving on.
Betty and Veronica in Pop Chock’lit Shoppe in the CW program Riverdale, a modern masterpiece. Pop’s is absolutely a soda fountain and, by definition, a pop stand. At one point in the show, Archie Andrews stands on the roof with a Molotov cocktail—planning to blow that pop stand.
I did not read any Capital-R Romance this week, but I did talk a French-speaking friend through filling out several thrilling forms over the phone. She often says “life in America is paper” and she’s not wrong.
Here’s what I’ve read lately in small-r romance, super briefly because I spent all week messing with website stuff instead of writing either fiction or this newsletter. (This week’s content warnings are imperfect because my memory and notes are not great, so do watch out.)
One Night in Boukos (2 romances: m/f, both cis and het + nonbinary character attracted to men/cis man, fantasy) by AJ Demas. This was so fun—something about having two romances happening at once plus most of the action taking place in the same city of the course of one night makes it feel just like a play. Content warnings: slavery, references to rape, violence.
Combustion (het m/bi f, both cis, sci-fi/steampunk, erotic) by Elia Winters. This book is about a woman inventor who makes “felicitation devices” and I am obsessed with that phrase. She’s prickly and independent and the man who becomes her business partner is absolutely smitten with her just the way she is. (Disclosure: Elia Winters is my friend. But her books are good and also hot as fuck, that’s just the truth.) Content warnings: sex, BDSM.
Budding Romance (f/f, both cis and lesbian, historical, novelette) by Lara Kinsey. A sweet story about a woman who buys an old house in France with the goal of turning it into a school for girls and the gardener she hires. Some excellent linguistics tidbits in here! Content warnings: sex.
Perfect Matcha (gay m/bi m, both cis, contemporary, erotic, novella) by Erin McLellan. Erin McLellan books are just like shots of happiness for me. This one perfectly deploys “I don’t know how to do [sex thing] and I need you to teach me, for practice” as a trope and I love it. Content warnings: sex, BDSM.
Honeytrap (m/m, both cis and bi, historical) by Aster Glenn Gray. A Soviet agent and an American agent get assigned to work together at the height of the Cold War, but this book is charmingly domestic and introspective for something that’s ostensibly about espionage. It’s unusual among romances for its long (thirty-plus years!) timeline, which I enjoyed. It does deal with some heavy subject matter, though. Content warnings: suicide, homophobia, abuse, workplace sexual harassment, mentions of alcoholism, sex.
And in things that are neither Romance nor romance, I read Alyssa Cole’s thriller When No One Is Watching, about a historically Black neighborhood in Brooklyn where neighbors keep disappearing while gentrification plows forward. I think the key to writing good suspense is crafting characters that readers will really care about, so this was wildly suspenseful. I really wanted Sydney and all her old neighbors to be okay. A total page-turner. Content warnings: racism/white supremacy/US history, police brutality, nonconsensual medical stuff including institutionalization and needles, violence, death, grief, not quite alcoholism but a lot of unhealthy drinking, discussion of past abusive relationships, sex.
Fingers crossed that this first newsletter from Mailchimp arrived in your inbox without a problem. See you next Sunday!
