Science Fiction & Fantasy Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for science fiction and fantasy enthusiasts. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
In James Blish's book Jack of Eagles, there is this dialogue:
"Shut the door, Tooey. So you're Danny Caiden. Your mother must of hung too much around the movies."
"The name's a corruption of a New Orleans term that would be familiar to anybody with two brain cells," Danny said evenly.
What New Orleans term is the name a corruption of, and what does the first speaker think it has to do with movies?
Likely this was a reference to Oscar and Golden-Globe winning actor Danny Kaye, who was very popular in the 1940s and 1950s. If his mother had been hanging around the movies, she would certainly have seen him in some of the biggest films of the day, including White Christmas, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty and The Court Jester.
The "corruption" of the surname is almost certainly Caiden = Acadien, a term that would be instantly familiar to New Orleanians.
