Salute to Walter Tevis

A little less than a month ago Wall Street Journal critic Joe Morgenstern mentioned an alleged fact to myself and a few others at a Telluride Film Festival dinner. He said that the colloquial term “loser” was first coined in Walter Tevis‘s 1959 book “The Hustler.” It caught on in a bigger way two years later when Robert Rossen‘s The Hustler, an adaptation of Tevis’s book, opened.

The line was spoken at the end of Act One by George C. Scott, referring to Paul Newman‘s Eddie Felson: “Stick with this kid…he’s a loser.” It was used two more times in the film by Newman.

Until Morgenstern mentioned this I never knew that prior to ’59 (or ’61 or sometime during that end-of-the-Eisenhower-era period) Average Joes never used this term in common conversation. I realize it has a psychological connotation that relates to post-World War II ennui among the go-getter classes, but I thought it had been kicking around since…I don’t know, the late ’40s or something.

I do know that three years after The Hustler opened the Beatles cut a song called “I’m a Loser,” and a year later Bob Dylan referred to a nurse being “some local loser” in the song “Desolation Row.”

11 thoughts on “Salute to Walter Tevis”

All the referencing about Walter Tevis and The Hustler and Dylan and the Beatles and that’s your comment? That you “like” this song (without referring to which of the two)? Are you by any chance a moron? Effing spambots. [Spambot comment deleted]

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Quick check of IMDB for film titles with “loser” states that Fritz Lang’s “You Only Live Once” (1937) had a working title “Three Time Loser”.

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Oxford English Dictionary traces the usage to 1955:

1955 Amer. Speech 30 304 Loser,‥someone‥hopeless.

1959 Amer. Speech 34 154 Those limited in ability or old-fashioned in dress or manners, [are] losers.

1959 Amer. Speech 34 154 The opposite of a B[ig] M[an] O[n] C[ampus] is a loser.

American Speech is a scholarly journal.

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All the referencing about Walter Tevis and The Hustler and Dylan and the Beatles and that’s your comment? That you “like” this song (without referring to which of the two)? Are you by any chance a moron? Effing spambots. [Spambot comment deleted] American Speech is a scholarly journal. Ugh boots on sale at discount prices for american baseball teenagers like you! Save now money.

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..So before “The Hustler” came out we would’ve been calling DeeZee something else?

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I think Hollis is on to something. Just the word “loser” may not have been used prior to then. But I’m sure I’ve heard the term “two-time loser” or “three-time loser” used in noir films older than ’59.

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Yeah, the term was around earlier than Tevis – who dropped it quite a few more times than that in the film (Bert calls hims a “born loser”, which Eddie discusses later on with Sarah) making the word a pretty prevalent totem in the film and hard to forget.

Oddly, Jeff botches Bert/Scott’s quote – the very one he’s linked to within: it is “STAY with this kid; he’s a loser”, not “STICK”.

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Aack-aack…error.

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