Chrysti the Wordsmith > Radio Scripts

Carl Sandburg said "slang is a language that rolls up its sleeves, spits on its hands, and goes to work." One of the hardest working members of our slang vocabulary has to be the term 'drag'.

In the 1700s, a drag was a cart or wagon, 'dragged' by horses. In the early years of the mechanized age, folks linguistically blurred the line between horses and horsepower by referring to automobiles as "drags". The association between wheeled drags and the roads they traversed may have inspired the expressions "main drag" and "drag race."

In the teen slang of the mid 20th C, a drag was a young woman who needed an escort to a dance, or one's girlfriend or sweetheart, someone to affectionately 'drag along.'

Then, of course, there's the drag on a cigarette that draws smoke into the lungs, and the human drag who's a disappointing bore.

To dress in drag is an expression galvanized by men assuming women's roles onstage during the 18th and 19th centuries. The long skirts dragging across the floor created a sensation antithetical to trousered locomotion. The phrase dress in drag in all its novel implications follows us boldly into the 21st century.

Radio Script > Drag