Stefan Fatsis, “Why Do Figure Skaters Go to the ‘Kiss and Cry’ to Get Their Scores?” (Slate, Feb. 18, 2014)
But it took a few years for “kiss and cry” to travel from the rink and the production truck into the sports vernacular. Wall Street Journal language columnist Ben Zimmer says the first reference to “kiss and cry” in news databases is a May 1987 article by John Powers of the Boston Globe. “Yes,” Powers wrote, “that place where figure skaters clutch their flowers and await their marks has a name—the Kiss and Cry Area.” The Times didn’t use “kiss and cry” until a pre-Olympics, pre-knee-whacking profile of Nancy Kerrigan in January 1994.
The phrase, Zimmer says, is one of several “kiss and blank” descendants of “kiss and tell,” which dates to a 1695 comedy by the English poet and playwright William Congreve. (“O fie, miss, you must not kiss and tell.”) For instance, “kiss and ride” was coined around 1956 by the general manager of the Chicago Transit Authority after he watched wives kiss husbands goodbye at a train drop-off, Zimmer says.
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