Rung-a-dung-dung.

I was listening to Mark Steyn’s podcasts about the songs of the great lyricist Sammy Cahn, who had more American standards than the Home Depot. Whoever you are, you've heard his songs, and you'll hear many again as Christmas approaches. “Ain’t That a Kick in the Head,” “Come Fly with Me,” “Come Dance with Me,” “High Hopes,” “Written on the Wind,” “My Kind of Town,” “Three Coins in the Fountain,” "Let It Snow," “Love and Marriage,” “The Christmas Waltz,” “It’s Been a Long, Long Time,” "I've Heard That Song Before," “Call Me Irresponsible,” “It’s Magic,” “All the Way”---four Oscars among those and another 23 Oscar nominations, and those are only the songs used in the movies.

You’ll notice a lot of these were recorded by Sinatra, and Steyn makes the point that Cahn’s easy lyrical style was perfect for Sinatra’s ring-a-ding style, and did so much for what would be considered the Rat Pack lounge style.

One of the things Sinatra liked to do was sling nicknames at people in the Cahn songs of his Capitol Records days, and possibly in real life for all I know. For example, in “Come Blow Your Horn”:

You've got to sound your "A" the day you're born,
I tell ya, chum, it’s time to come blow your horn.

And in “The Boys’ Night Out”:

Hey there, buster, it’s the Injuns after Custer
It's the boys’ night out

And in “Love and Marriage”:

This I tell ya, brother,
You can't have one without the other.

And in “Come Dance with Me”:

Hey there, cutes, put on your dancin’ boots
And come dance with me

Sinatra would do that kind of thing with other songs not written by Cahn, things like taking the devoted “darling” out of Cole Porter and replacing it with the diminutive “baby.” I don’t want to read too much into it, but there’s a definite lack of respect being shown even to the supposed object of one’s affection.

Now, maybe some people like to be called chum or buster or cutes or sweetheart or chuckles, but it’s always struck me that Frankie and his admirers did it as a means of not having to learn your name, a prelude to his peeling a couple of bills from the roll and expecting you to roll over for him. Guys like that kind of thing when they’re the roll-holder, but let’s face it---most of us are the rolled.

It becomes more obvious if you just move the nicknames a little further down the scale of acceptability:

You've got to toot your flute the day you're born,
I tell ya, ho, it’s time to go blow your horn.

Hey there, schmuck, it’s the Injuns run amok
It's the boys’ night out

This I tell ya, stupid,
You can’t go running out on cupid

Hey there, fats, put on your dancin’ spats
And come dance with me

This is why, no matter how much I smoked and drank and wore sharp hats and chased after women, I was never asked to join the Rat Pack. I might have passed the physical but I’d have still washed out of basic.