A scream! A stroke of brilliance! One shot! Then the fateful cry: “Man Overbo-o-oard!” And the next thing you know is that you squeeze a beautiful woman wearing only a thin nightgown. In her hand, she holds a pistol from which it has just been fired! Google`s Ngram graph for “legal beagle” versus “legal eagle” for the period 1920-2005 looks like this: At least for the world in prison, we believe we can assume three reasons for synonyms: first, a basic human pleasure in puns, which produces rhymed slang such as legal eagle or legal beagle; secondly, the vast inventory of names that already exist in the American language, from which, for example, black names originate; and, finally, those arising from the particular problems of daily prison life. Idiomation decided to support things and start over with the Legal Eagle search, as the term Legal Eagle is also a complementary term for a lawyer. It is also often used interchangeably with the term legal beagle. The April 27, 2011 issue of Long Island Pulse magazine quickly proved that the term is very complementary to lawyers. BIANCA AND ALBERTO: [sung] We`d better trust the legal eagle. An early striking example of “Legal Eagle” appears in a review of an American piece of music called Wildflower in the Sydney [New South Wales] Morning Herald (December 1, 1924): A very early example of “Legal Eagle” in the United States appears Henry Gaston, The Little Lawyer; or The Farmers.” Advisor to mechanics, miners, labourers and businessmen, legal aid and legal advisers (1880): As the citation suggests, an eagle was a $10 gold coin and a two-headed eagle was a $20 gold coin. The “legal” modifier in front of each name simply indicates that government specifications required the weight of each piece to meet the specification to be legal tender. The “legal eagle” here is not a lawyer or even a human being. 1. Is the Beagle variant a play on words, a moon green or an eggspeck? I`m not a legal beagle, not even a lawyer like Downing, but I served 28 sessions in the Oklahoma legislature during recessions and even a depression, so if they think this last session was the “hardest ever,” it only underscores how little they know. Tom Leidy became the attorney for the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.
in Reading, Pennsylvania, where he practices law. Dwight Parsons, Legal Eagle of Akron, Ohio, attended the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia. That blur that ran through the Bay Area about a month ago would be our own D. Draper Fairbrother, sales manager, government advisor, legal eagle and lukewarm gardener. Old D.D.F. was chosen by Bilgewater Gulch`s National Production Authority to rule in Washington, D.C. as a “nailed expert wooden box.” The most intriguing case of “legal beagle,” however, is the one involving Perry Mason, the mysterious defender of Gardner`s many novels. The man and phrase appear several times in the January 19, 1948 issue of Life magazine, this time in an advertisement for another Gardner novel, The Case of the Crooked Candle: SIDE NOTE 1: Sometimes the term Legal Eagle is used instead of Legal Beagle. Both terms are sometimes replaced by the phrase Philadelphia lawyer! In the February 5, 1977 issue of People magazine, Jim Jerome wrote about Rod Stewart in the article “Da Ya think I`m Sexy?” In the first paragraph, the reference to Rod Stewart`s separation from Britt Ekland, with whom he was associated for a period of two years, mentioned a lawsuit and legal representation that ensured Britt Ekland. The earliest correspondence I found for “legal beagle” comes from an unidentified article in Publication of the American Dialect Society (1944) annotating the sentence [combined excerpts]: In Australia, where Wildflower productions toured the country for years, “legal eagle” seems to have settled directly into the play`s popularity in the 1920s. In the United States, there are few similarities to “Legal Eagle” between 1923 and 1939, when the Marx Brothers film At the Circus appears, in which Groucho plays a lawyer “Legal Eagle”. Yet “Legal Eagle” seems to have become a fairly established term in the United States by the mid-1940s.
Wentworth & Flexner places both terms in the subcategory of “intentional rhyme terms and jive” of “rhyme terms and rhymed slang” – and that certainly seems reasonable. But the dictionary takes no position on whether “legal beagle” comes from “legal eagle.” Legal eagle N. A dedicated or cunning and extremely knowledgeable lawyer. The term legal beagle is hard to come by before the 1940s, but the idiomation found the term legal eagle in the book “The Little Lawyer and Legal Adviser” by Napa and San Jose, attorney Henry Alexander Gaston (9. August 1823 – unknown) described at the beginning of the book as a former member of the California legislature and deceased president of the Nevada State Assembly. His book was self-published in 1880 with the help of A.L. Bancroft and Company at 721 Market Street in San Francisco, CA. In this book, the term Legal Eagle was explained to readers. The research also uncovered an American Bar Center book published by the American Law Student Association in 1958. There were three entries worth mentioning in this book: one was a publication called “Legal Eagle” at American University, the second was a publication called “Legal Beagle” at Washington College of Law, and the third was “The Legal Eagle” at North Carolina College. A few years earlier, in one of the 1952 American Eagle newsletters, the term Legal Eagle appeared in a short blurb about one of the well-known men in the forest products industry. Houston continues to be a legal eagle with Sullivan and Cromwell and a growing representative of the “ultimate result of human wisdom acting on human experience for the benefit of the public” (Samuel Johnson).
The “corpse” quickly jumps to his feet – with a big smile on his face! It`s Perry Mason – and the tireless “legal beagle” has just solved one of the strangest cases of his career. A case based on the strange hint of a wax candle so important that it sends a man and almost the BAD MAN murder on the electric chair! Lloyd Paul Stryker, the legal eagle, landed a client last week who had not only already confessed and pleaded guilty, but had also been convicted and convicted. In fact, when he thought about it, Mr. Stryker apparently decided that while the case was very challenging, it had its drawbacks, and he withdrew. J.E. Lighter, Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang (1997) gives the first citations of 1939 for “legal eagle” and 1949 for “legal beagle”. Both terms have the same definition: Oh, I doubt very much it`s that complicated, but, as you suggest, just a pretty obvious juxtaposition of rhyming words. I think the term is used more good-natured than hostile. It is certainly not a phrase you would use to express your fear in the presence of a jurisprudential genius, but a lawyer called a “legal beagle” would not be offended either.
(By the way, “legal-eagle” is by far the less used of the two.) These first two allusions to Perry Mason as a “legal beagle” seem to be a game with his amazing ability to uncover the truth in a mysterious entangled ability that makes him appear partly as a lawyer and partly as a bloodhound. But why “legal beagle” instead of “legal bloodhound”? Aside from the appeal of rhyme, I think the writer was probably influenced by the existence of the “legal eagle,” which has been increasingly used as an American slang term since the late 1930s. BIANCA AND ALBERTO: Yes, it is certain as it can be / That he will soon earn his fees.
