Part Secret Society Badge and Part Autograph Book

December 22, 2022 3:33 PM

Ashcraft scrawled “Short Snorter No. 1” one of the bills, initiating the man into a club of sorts (and earning a buck for his troubles). A “snorter” was a shot of liquor; a “short snorter” was a small amount that wouldn’t put the pilots like Ashcraft over the legal limit; and a short snorter bill was evidence that you had a place among the still small number of people who had taken to the skies. from How to Spot a ‘Short Snorter’ [previously]
posted by chavenet (4 comments total)

In the beforetimes, between jobs and free to take a traveling holiday in 2015, I flew 14 times in 21 days around SE Asia. With cheap flights running like bus services, the notion of keeping track is now something I'd leave to my reward card.

(Sadly I don't have a snifter at the price they cost when flying on budget airlines.)
posted by k3ninho at 4:39 PM on December 22, 2022 [1 favorite]

That “previously” link was a blast from the past. I believe I read the original 2010 MeFi post on my previous account. A few years ago my mom passed away. Going through her things, I found a short snorter (a U.S. $1 bill) my dad had signed in 1942 for his first trans-Pacific flight. He was a pilot in the US Army Air Corps (precursor to U.S. Air Force). If it wasn’t for that MeFi post I would have had no idea what it was. I’m only now connecting that it was on MeFi that I originally learned about short snorters.
posted by BlueTongueLizard at 4:50 PM on December 22, 2022 [8 favorites]

Writer John Steinbeck complained that the short snorter club had ballooned out of control, describing it as a “menace” in a dispatch from North Africa to the New York Herald Tribune in 1943. “The original half of the joke has been lost,” he wrote. “Serious and intelligent gentlemen sign one another’s bills with an absolute lack of humor.”

This quote struck me in that Steinbeck basically states the short snorter became the reverse of the meme, which of course often multiplies in humor with the number of times shared. I guess "prochronism" would be the right word for evoking the concept of memes. I spent time looking for a single word that encompassed "portraying the negative of a concept that doesn't yet exist in a particular time period" and found exactly none.

Interesting read though. I like the concept.
posted by sevenofspades at 7:19 PM on December 22, 2022 [2 favorites]

At first glance, I thought this was about former Attorney General John Ashcroft and some secret society of DC Republicans, and I thought yeah, that tracks.
posted by Faint of Butt at 7:38 AM on December 23, 2022 [1 favorite]