Today’s word of the day, courtesy of Dictionary.com, is utter. Utter can be a verb or an adjective. As an adjective, it means “complete; total; absolute, unconditional; unqualified” (https://www.dictionary.com/browse/utter). As a verb, it can be either transitive (meaning it takes a direct object) or intransitive (meaning it does not take a direct object). As a transitive verb, it has a number of meanings, about half of which relate to speaking or making verbal noises. But some of the others are “to give forth (a sound) otherwise than with the voice; to express by written or printed words; to make publicly known; to publish; to put into circulation, as coins, notes, and especially counterfeit money or forged checks.” And there are a couple of obsolete meanings, “to publish, as a book; to sell,” and one British meaning, “to expel; discharge or emit.” As an intransitive verb, it means “to employ the faculty of speech; use the voice to talk, make sounds, etc., to sustain utterance; undergo speaking.”

The adjective form goes all the way back to “Old English utera, uterra, ‘”outer, exterior, external,’ from Proto-Germanic *utizon (source also of Old Norse utar, Old Frisian uttra, Middle Dutch utere, Dutch uiter-, Old High German uzar, German äußer ‘outer’), comparative adjective from ut (see out (adv.)). Meaning ‘complete, total (i.e. ‘going to the utmost point’) is from early 15c” (https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=utter). So the adjective form experienced generalization, going from “outer” to “the greatest extent.”

The verb form finds its way into English in “c. 1400, in part from Middle Dutch uteren or Middle Low German utern ‘to turn out, show, speak,’ from uter ‘outer,’ comparative adjective from ut ‘out’ (see utter (adj.)); in part from Middle English verb outen ‘to disclose,’ from Old English utan ‘to put out,’ from ut (see out (v.)). Compare German äussern ‘to utter, express,’ from aus ‘out;’ and colloquial phrase out with it ‘speak up!’ Formerly also used as a commercial verb (as release is now)” (https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=utter). The etymology here seems to imply that the Germanic word, which was naturally a part of Old English, was reborrowed from Dutch or Low German in the late Middle Ages to express something a little different.

According to On This Day, on this date in 1927 the silent movie It was released to the USA. Oddly, the wiki for the movie says that, after premiering in Los Angeles on January 14 and then opening in New York on February 5, it was released on February 19. But I guess it is pretty close to say that It opened today. It caught my attention because my first thought was that it was an early sci-fi horror type of flick, but no. There was a sci-fi horror film called It! The Terror from Beyond Space, a B film that came out in 1958 (and, some say, inspired the 1979 class Alien), but the 1927 film is neither sci-fi nor horror.

It was, in modern parlance, a rom-com, and it starred Clara Bow (1905-1965). And it features a lot of the tropes that we still see in contemporary rom-coms. To make it easy, I’m just going to share the entire IMDB plot summary:

Spunky shop girl Betty Lou Spence (Clara Bow) has a crush on her handsome employer, Cyrus Waltham, Jr. (Antonio Moreno), the new manager of and heir to the “world’s largest store”. However, they belong to different social classes and he is already romantically linked to blonde socialite Adela Van Norman (Jacqueline Gadsden). But Cyrus’s silly friend Monty (William Austin) notices Betty, and she uses him to get closer to Cyrus.
When Betty finally gets Cyrus’s attention, she convinces him to take her on a date to Coney Island, where he is introduced to the proletarian pleasures of roller coasters and hot dogs and has a wonderful time. At the end of the evening he tries to kiss her. She slaps his face and hurries out of his car and into her flat, but then peeks out her window at him as he is leaving.
The next day, meddling welfare workers are trying to take away the baby of Betty’s sickly roommate Molly (Priscilla Bonner). To protect her friend, Betty bravely claims that the baby is in fact hers. Unfortunately, this is overheard by Monty, who tells Cyrus. Although he is in love with her, Cyrus offers her an “arrangement” that includes everything but marriage. Shocked and humiliated, Betty Lou refuses, quits her job, and resolves to forget Cyrus. When she learns from Monty about Cyrus’s misunderstanding, she fumes and vows to teach her former beau a lesson.
When Cyrus hosts a yachting excursion, Betty Lou makes Monty take her along, masquerading as “Miss Van Cortland”. Cyrus at first wants to remove her from the ship, but he cannot long resist Betty Lou’s it factor; he eventually corners her and proposes marriage, but she gets him back, by telling him that she’d “…rather marry his office boy,” which accomplishes her goal, but breaks her heart. He then learns the truth about the baby and leaves Monty at the yacht’s helm to find her. Monty crashes the yacht into a fishing boat, tossing both Betty Lou and Adela into the water. Betty Lou saves Adela, punching her in the face when she panics and threatens to drown them both. At the end of the film, she and Cyrus reconcile on the anchor of the yacht, with the first two letters of the ship’s name, Itola, between them. Monty and Adela are upset at losing their friends, but it is implied they pursue a relationship with each other as the film ends. (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0018033/plotsummary/).

The film was a hit, and it made Clara Bow a star. It also popularized the idea of the “it” girl, a girl with a “quality possessed by some which draws all others with its magnetic force” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_(1927_film)). Despite its success, the film seemed lost for many years, but in the ‘60s, a copy was discovered. The film type is called nitrate (there’s a longer term, but that doesn’t really matter). This type of film has two drawbacks: it is highly flammable, and it decomposes. So the existence of a copy of It in a nitrate base is a bit of miracle. The movie was selected “for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being ‘culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant’” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_(1927_film)).

Here’s another interesting little tidbit about the movie. Clara Bow, in 1927, was not only making movies; she was also involved romantically with a young actor whom she helped secure roles in her pictures. In It he played a reporter, an unnamed character, but he had larger roles in two other films Bow was in. The name of that actor was Gary Cooper, one of the finest movie actors of the 20^th century. He was also one of the most taciturn, rarely uttering more than a syllable at a time.

The image today is a poster from the 1927 film It, starring Clara Bow (https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Film/It1927).