Sent to: Yahoo! Groups: DrumCircles: Message 832
Date: Tue Sep 25, 2K1 8:44 am
Peanut Gallery By Reverend R Clark
Greetings Paul and ALL!
At 08:55 AM 9/25/01 +0000, Paul wrote:
What is a peanut gallery?
At circuses where part of the traditional fare is cotton candy and roasted in the shell peanuts. The audience therefore is seen as a group of peanut munchers AKA the "peanut gallery".
WordNet defines it: “second balcony, family circle, upper balcony, peanut gallery -- (rearmost or uppermost area in the balcony containing the least expensive seats)”
DictionaryDotCom adds: “A group of people whose opinions are considered unimportant: "Pressure is building... to force... Alan Greenspan to cut interest rates and pump up the money supply. [He] has politely ignored these catcalls from the peanut gallery." (H. Erich Heinemann).”
World Wide Words fills out the history of the phrase: “It [has] a theatrical origin, and goes back to America at the end of last century. The "peanut gallery" was the topmost tier of seats, the cheapest in the house, a long way from the stage. The same seats in British theatres were (and still are) often called "the gods" because you were so high you seemed to be halfway to heaven, up there with the allegorical figures that were often painted on the ceiling. On both sides of the Atlantic, these seats attracted an impecunious class of patron, with a strong sense of community, often highly irreverent and with a well-developed ability to heckle, hence the modern figurative meaning. A significant difference between the American and British theatres is that American patrons ate peanuts; these made wonderful missiles for showing their opinion of artistes they didn't like. Most Americans of a certain age will know the phrase because it was used in a slightly different sense in the fifties children's television programme, the Howdy Doody Show. There it was the name for the ground-level seating for the kids, the "peanuts," though the phrase was almost certainly derived from the older sense. They were just as noisy and irreverent as their theatrical forebears, or indeed the "groundlings" of Shakespeare's time, with a liking for low humour and a total lack of sense or discrimination.”
Peace, R
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-- for those who harbour such thoughts hatred will never cease.
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In this world hatred is never appeased by hatred;
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