Welcome to She Done It. I'm Caroline Cremton.

One of the things I love about reading detective fiction from the 1920s and 1930s, what we call

the Golden Age, is what I learn about that time period just from its who done it. There's

so much social and cultural history contained in the pages of even the most seemingly superficial

of stories. Most of the time, this process of imbibing the contemporary context is entirely

enjoyable. But occasionally, a word or phrase comes along that I've never seen before, and

I'm reminded a new that almost a century separates the publication of these books and

me deciding to read them. These are expressions that would clearly have made complete sense

to the 1920s reader, but are now completely opaque to us in the 2020s. And so, I decided

to make a glossary of sorts, in an attempt to gain a better understanding of what Golden

Age detective novelists were really trying to say in their stories. And to do this properly,

I've called in an expert. Long time friend of She Done It, Helen Zoltzmann. Helen is

the host of the illusionist, a marvellous podcast about language, and generally an enthusiast

of all kinds of linguistic curiosities. All of the words and phrases that you're going

to hear us discussing today are ones that I've either encountered during my own reading,

or they've been sent in by members of the podcast's paid membership community, The She Done It

Book Club. If you'd like to be in on creating future episodes like this, you can become a member

now by heading to She Done It Book Club.com's last join. It's also a bonus episode with about

half an hour of extra word discussion that will be published later this month just for

members to enjoy. So if you'd like to hear more of our conversation, you can do that once

you've joined the club too. Now let's get into the glossary.

So the first word of phrase that we're going to try and define for you today is this pair

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