Deep Pocket As A Slang Term
The term “deep pockets” (also given as “deep pocket” and “deep pocketed") is attested sparsely in the 1940s through the 1960s, but became popular with the litigation explosion of the 1970s.
A person with “short arms” and “deep pockets” is a person (sometimes derided as “miserly” or “cheap") who saves money and doesn’t often spend it. The term “short arms and deep/long pockets” is cited in print from at least 1952.
In Ireland, this phrase was attached to a wealthy business man from Tipparary who, upon his round of drinks, would break his glass on the floor, knowing the owner of the pub would ask him to leave. This was also called the “O’Shea Fiddle”.
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Famous quotes containing the words deep, pocket, slang and/or term:
“I think ... I have inside me a sort of answer to the want of today: to the real, deep want of the English people, not to just what they fancy they want. And gradually, I shall get my hold on them.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“The stabbing horror of life is not contained in calamities and disasters, because these things wake one up and one gets very familiar and intimate with them and finally they become tame again.... No, it is more like being in a hotel room in Hoboken let us say, and just enough money in one’s pocket for another meal.”
—Henry Miller (1891–1980)
“It is a mass language only in the same sense that its baseball slang is born of baseball players. That is, it is a language which is being molded by writers to do delicate things and yet be within the grasp of superficially educated people. It is not a natural growth, much as its proletarian writers would like to think so. But compared with it at its best, English has reached the Alexandrian stage of formalism and decay.”
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)
“The term clinical depression finds its way into too many conversations these days. One has a sense that a catastrophe has occurred in the psychic landscape.”
—Leonard Cohen (b. 1934)