More than friends

What it means to be ‘an item’

August 30, 2009|Jan Freeman

In the era of spill-it-all social networking, can we still describe a possibly amorous couple as an item, or is such discreetly winking terminology out of date? Chuck Eisenhardt of Arlington, after using the label in a Facebook posting several months ago, wrote to ask whether it was appropriate there, and where it had come from in the first place. “It sounds as though it springs from big-city society pages: polite, but to the point,” he said.

The romantic item, however, began its career not in good society but in the celebrity gossip columns, where it still flourishes. Search Google News, and you’ll find dozens of stars and wannabes either revealing or denying that they’ve been item-ized: Kate Hudson and A-Rod, Lindsay Lohan and Samantha Ronson, Jennifer Aniston and Gerard Butler, Renee Zellweger and Bradley Cooper.

Several slang dictionaries call this item a 1980s usage, and even the Oxford English Dictionary, in an entry revised in 2001, dates it only to 1970. But zillions more words have been made Web-accessible in the past few years; today, a search of Google News turns up examples of item for “suspected romance” as early as the 1930s. (Most of them, culled from ProQuest’s news archives, are available to nonsubscribers only as snippets; but for our purpose, snippets supply more than enough context.)

The earliest example I’ve dug up so far is a “Looking at Hollywood” column from October 1937, that appeared in the Chicago Tribune (and surely in other papers). “Gloria Blondell and Ronald Reagan are an item,” it alleged. (They were costarring in “Accidents Will Happen,” with Reagan as a young and honest insurance man.) Just a few months later, Hedda Hopper launched her Hollywood gossip column, and for the next few decades she slugged it out with rival Louella Parsons, establishing the item usage firmly in the American consciousness.

It’s been a fairly racy career for a word with such sedate origins. Item, Latin for “thus, likewise,” was borrowed into English around 1400 for use (as an adverb) in enumerations. Perhaps the most famous is Olivia’s catalog of her attractions in Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night”: “Item, two lips indifferent red; item, two grey eyes, with lids to them; item, one neck, one chin, and so forth.”