ABSTRACT
The phrase has exercised at least some small influence in Britain: a clear allusion occurs in Robert Crawford’s ‘thriller’. Kiss the Boss Goodbye, 1970:
‘We can’t afford to wait,’ he said… ‘Thrumbleton,’ I said, ‘here I come.’ And the New Yorker, on 6 Aug. 1973, heads a review of books about the state thus: ‘California, Here I Come’. ‘Surely adumbrated, at least, by the 1849-50 Gold Rush slogans like “California or bust”’ (R.C., 1977). Certainly! What’s
more, the phrase ‘can hardly have arisen from the song, whose second line is “Right back where I started from”’ (Jack Eva, 1978). True; yet the title may have had something to do with the popularity of the c.p. call. See: daft; don’t call; duty calls; if you c.; many are called; run up; you take. call it eight bells! (—let’s). This nautical, mostly RN, c.p. dates, so far as I’ve been able to ascertain, from c. 1890: and it serves as a convenient and most acceptable excuse for drinking before noon, before which time it has long been held unseemly to take strong liquor. (Ware, 1909.) See also Sailor Slang. call me (or you can call me) anything (or what) you like, so (or as) long as you don’t call me late for breakfast. This mostly Aus. c.p., belonging to late C19-20, is used by one who has been addressed by the wrong name-or by a hesitant or embarrassed no-naming. A.B., 1978, recalls, ‘I’ve heard it [in England] “call me anything but late”—obviously a truncated version’. Cf say something, even if it’s only ‘Goodbye’. call me cut. In Nathaniel Field’s A Woman Is a Weathercock, 1612, at IV, ii:
PENDANT:…For profit, this marriage (God speed it!) marries you to it; and for pleasure, if I help you not to that as cheap as any man in England, call me cut.
