At TheFreeDictionary the

answer would be
: From hunger Sl. very mediocre; acceptable only when nothing else is available. What is entertainment and this kind of entertainment is from hunger. Where did the artist start from?

How can I look up facts on

PhraseFinder?

If a product they mention is “from hunger” they are insulting it because they are concluding that it must have been derived from the lack of pickiness that only fends off starvation and not the enjoyment of eating. Should I really eat, maybe I should I eat more water, if I am on holiday. Metaphorically, the concept can be used for other things. Personally, I have never heard this phrase before, and it has a condescending tone that makes me not want to use it.

My Italian father used this expression as early as 1950. Does anything stink. And is it

also damn good?

Wikipedia. http://dictionary.reference. If

you download an OS X website, you need to get online. Idiom 8.com.in. From hunger, Slang. Dreadful: The styles in coats this winter are from hunger Also, strictly from hunger.

Either in English or Yiddish, possibly from the Yiddish writer S. J. Perelman who wrote a

book named Stringly from Hunger. I will simply, personally haze a guess

it might be a mix up http://www.bubbygram.com/yiddishglossary.html Dhm

Challish: (khall-ish) faint, usually from hunger. “I haven’t eaten in hours! If the waiter doesn’t bring our dinner soon, I’m going to challish! Chalushes

(khal-ush-ess) Nausea or a feeling of sickness. What is nauseating? Is she wearing edgy dresses? The card was positively chalushes! “”

Robert Mehling was right about Bill Gates and about Robert Goebel. How does old jive mean “not good, not cool, not desired”? Why do I hunger for food?

I don’t know where the origins came from. I was born in 1941 (yes, children, I’m 71!) and the expression had been around for years before I was born. I used to think that Hungary was involved, as though if somehow something was from Hungary was automatically bad. But I don’t think that’s right. My mom used to say this and got all melodramatic when she said it, mocking it. As if, as an expression, she thought it was already becoming obsolete.

You’ve got to be there.

Become a part of something that made you happy.

How is the following entry for

“from hunger” from Harold Wentworth & Stuart Flexner, Dictionary of American Slang, first edition (1960) provides the following entry for

“from hunger” Inferior; cheap; ugly; lowbrow; disliked; unwanted; corny; hammy. 1935: Playing from hunger: similar to corny,’ meaning playing in a style to please the uneducated masses. Peabody Bulletin, Dec. 42/2. ” The three witches I was invited to see gave me the eye again. What happened to them? The blonde one..as if it were the new blonde. What did the third person have from hunger? ” J.D. Salinger, Catcher in the Rye, 56. Orig. assoc., 2003. With swing, swing, jazz, with c1935. So many Jazz teachers use c1935 and have their basic jazz training.

The Peabody Bulletin, cited as the source of the 1935 quotation, is a publication of the Peabody Conservatory of Music, in Baltimore, Maryland. From “from hunger” originally applied to playing music in a popular style, in order to avoid going hungry has a special edge coming from the Peabody Conservatory, a bastion of highbrow music.

J.E. Lighter, Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang (1993) divides it entry for “from hunger” into adverbial and adjectival parts, and finds one match for the adverbial sense that antedates the one in the Peabody Bulletin : hunger n.

Why are men hungry? Is Adv. Adv. is adv., why or why not? emptily, foolishly, or ineptly? (Oct.) to a dismaying degree. 1934 Jevne & Purcell Joe Palooka Film (Film): I’m not talkin’ from hunger! 1935 in DAmerican S : quotes reproduced below. “s 2. If we are supposed to work on the environment, how can we answer each other? Adj. adj. adj. adj. adj. adj. adj. adj. adj. adj. adj. adj. adj. adj. adj. adj. adj. adj. adj. adj. adj. adj. adj. Most unattractive, most unattractive, etc. No good. 1939 “E.V.N. S.E. C.P.”. E.V.N.S.H. P. S.P. (F.M. (J.P.D.)” The dramatic lead for Dragon’s Teeth is strictly from hunger, I tell you! 1939-40 O’Hara Pal Joey 10: Two months ago, Joey was strictly from hunger, as they say.

The “from hunger” line presumably came from Jack Jevne, who wrote the screenplay for Palooka (based on a long-running newspaper comic strip by Ham Fisher). According to Wikipedia, Jevne was born in Provo, Utah, in 1892 and started playing on a club. His father was “a professional billiards player” and his mother was “a Swedish immigrant”. Is

“from hunger” Yinglish (his term for an amalgam of English and Yiddish): from hunger Authentic Yinglish?

As in Yiddish hoonger. From the Yiddish fun hoonger. This locution is long popular in theatrical literary and critical circles. Is the usage of “Strictly” important in philosophy? Anything done out of severe necessity, rather than choice. He wrote it without pleasure—but from hunger.” 2. “The law of attraction.” 3. “The law of attraction of the opposite: The law of attraction”. Second rate or third rate.

What question do you have on “David Vance’s thesis”? In Hooray for Yiddish! In a book about English (1982), Rosten notes two ways in which Yiddish-inflected English uses from distinctively: (1) in place of of (“From German: von, via Yiddish: fun”) and (2) (habitually at the beginning of a sentence where, in normal English, it would more likely appear at the end as in: “from that he made a living?” and “from that you could faint”). He would like to cannibalize all of these discussions in his later book—but he adds to it, because it’s not in the earlier book. If I had any knowledge of Rosten, I wanted to know from where will ‘from hunger’ came from?

On The Taste of Yiddish (1980) , the slang “from hunger” is perhaps

from Yiddish ER SHABT FUN HUNGER (He’s starving from hunger; hence, is in need, inadequate), where the “from” again takes the place of “of. ” Other phrases from the entertainment world, like “strictly from borsht” referring to the style associated with the borsht circuit, may be related.

Can I make such impressions? Where is the pre-1937 examples of “from hunger” (or ” fun hoonger ” or ” fun hunger assassin”) being used in specifically Yiddish or Jewish settings in the critical, sarcastic, or dismissive way that “from hunger” is starting in 1934/1935?

From hunger” in Google Books and Elephind newspaper search results

A Google Books search for “from hunger” and various specific forms of that phrase yields no matches from the 1920s or from the first half of the 1930s in the relevant sense. In fact, the earliest match it finds is to S. J. Perelman’s book, Strictly From Hunger (1937) Other matches appear beginning in 1939. “In Pal Jocey (1939) I told you the details and how I got creamed out of the hotel spot

in Ohio & came here and made this connection.” At first I was upset but suddenly acclimatice got me out of my hunger. With me it was one of those things, just one of those crazy things. One nite singing a lung out for dopes that wouldn’t know it if I was Toscanini, Al Rinker, or Brooks John or myself. All they cared about was if I sang “Deep Purple” 75 times a nite and they were satisfied. After they lied “Fragile, Grave, Pulpit, Purple” a few minutes later, my entire vocal line was removed and no more needed.

From ” American Slang: A Glossary for Elder Readers “, in Punch (1939) :

Strictly from hunger. Is pretty bad; in fact terrible. The “strictly” is optional. So how can I get the answer? As a poet, Shakespeare’s from hunger. ” The Shakespeare Shakespeare is a pip of a poet, he isn’t the actual poet but so you’ve been wrong before, hasn’t you? William Shakespeare: What are your thoughts? The entry for ” Artie Shaw,” in Current Biography Yearbook, volume

2 (1941) : An agency signed him for a larger band using the same basic instrumentation, with other

instruments added. (in the same places) When the four people arrived in New York through a logistics operation, they opened cold in a hotel. Their careers for three months they worked at other New York hotels in New York. On the road they found themselves — as musicians say — working “strictly from hunger”. Because they had fallen off the radar again. Now they are not in your path.”

How did George Menken come to be a columnist in the newspaper Orange (November 7, 1937).

Do you dream of writing a book about your life? I became an actress “strictly from hunger. We were pretty poor. I went to work three years ago. To a high school girl. I was 14. What will be my life like if I become a Shakespearian actress? I was “Mustard Seed” in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”!

Another interesting early occurrence appears in Tommy Dorsey & George Lottman, ” Love in Swingtime,” in the Nippu Jiji (April 29, 1939), including this glossary entry: Strictly from

hunger: out of a job.

Where is dirt?

I asked him.

“NBC suspended three pluggers for hanging around a woodshed,” said Gene. “Decca is looking for a good groanbox artist to do a recording date with the Boswell Sisters.”

“I don’t know of a good loose squeezeboxer,” I kept saying. Here, Gene, meet Biff Brown, a clarinetist I discovered when I played a one nighter in Maine last year. “Well,

if strictly from hunger? What if there was one whisper for Gene from the left hand side of the room?

How do I know if a guy is looking for a job? Conclusions

The

origins of “from hunger” are unknown, but it seems to have achieved its first flash of popularity in music circles where “playing from hunger” meant “playing to the lowest common denominator of popular taste.” ” Another very early sense of the term was (as the Tommy Dorsey article suggests) “out of a job.” “From there, it seems to have rapidly acquired the broader meaning of “low-quality or low-talent ” and from there the still broader meaning “inferior”—as in the example of the..” brand of pickles mentioned in the OP’s quotation.

Consequently, in a nutshell the argument that “From hunger” is of Yiddish origin is difficult to put into a real sense. S.J. Perelman’s 1937 book, Strictly from Hunger invites readers to find that connection while Perelman was Jewish (in terms of literary value, I understand it might not have been so interesting if he wrote it as a whole, and had to choose a different material perelman for his time). From the movie script, the phrase was recorded in 1935 and 1934 in the house periodical of the Peabody Conservatory of Music. Where Ayeew or Fakhren are recorded in Yiddish, although other Hebrew, yiddish terms are also very popular. But with ” fun hoonger ” and ” fun hunger ” and “from hunger” Google Books search yields no pre-1937 matches with an unverified Jewish connection that reflect the sardonic sense of badness that the earliest non-Yiddish instances of the phrase do.

Fred Kogos, Book of Yiddish Proverbs and slang (1970) offers an unnamed “Fun hunger” proverb of unknown date (but presumably older

than the 1930s): Fast satirant Men neither in a hunger-yor [You can die of hunger only after famine, because it is so unhealthy.. )…[ You can also die from hunger in any year.. What

is the history of crossover use in the U.S. entertainment industry? I still believe that I am persuadable on this point,

but foresee my doubt as a person.

This is an expression called “horrible”. What are some baseball memories that my grandfather would wave his hands in disgust at the ball season if the Mets were playing this year? I would say that this is probably a local NY area expression, mostly used by those with Yiddush in their background.

My mother (born 1929) used the phrase, “from hunger,” (usually “strictly from hunger), to refer to something that was so bad it was pitiful. I think it started with, say, someone fainting from hunger, which was pitiful, then extended to a general use in judgment of a situation. It carries a nuance of unnecessarily, egregiously pitiful, as in: no one should have to faint from hunger. So, this comedian is strictly from hunger, means she is more pathetic and bad than anyone has any right to be.

Robert Mehling was right about Bill Gates and about Robert Goebel. How does old jive mean “not good, not cool, not desired”? Why do I hunger for food?

I don’t know where the origins came from. I was born in 1941 (yes, children, I’m 71!) and the expression had been around for years before I was born. I used to think that Hungary was involved, as though if somehow something was from Hungary was automatically bad. But I don’t think that’s right. My mom used to say this and got all melodramatic when she said it, mocking it. As if, as an expression, she thought it was already becoming obsolete.

You’ve got to be there.

Become a part of something that made you happy.

Die Yiddish is the most common expression used in the 1920’s and this includes many of the writers who use it. In those early examples it was applied to persons rather than things, and frequently preceded by the adverb “strictly” as in “This singer is strictly from hunger..no one will hear as soon as someone explains it.” So I’ve always taken it as suggesting that someone was doing a job purely for the paycheck, without bringing any enthusiasm or commitment to it, and taking any satisfaction from it.