The author of The G-String Murders and the autobiographical Gypsy, Miss Lee is remembered less for her way with words than for her ways with making less of her clothing.

Now it may be true that a rose is a rose is a rose, no matter what you call it, but in 1940, a Miss Georgia Sothern, another well-known practitioner of the art of taking off one's clothes in public, wrote to H.L. Mencken and asked him to please invent a dignified replacement for the word strip teaser. She felt, as people often do about the magic of words, that if you could just somehow give striptease a better name, objections to this type of dance would vanish, like the last of the seven veils.

Mencken replied that he had no brilliant suggestions, and the best he could think of was an analogy with the molting of animals. He considered moltician, he said, but feared it could be confused with mortician. Mencken then turned to the scientific term for molting — ecdysis — derived from a Greek verb meaning to take off or strip off. Following this line of thought, a strip-teaser would become an ecdysist or ecdysiast. Miss Georgia Sothern chose the latter and publicized it, and the word stuck. Gypsy Rose, Empress of Ecdysiasts, was none too impressed, observing of Mencken, "What does he know about stripping? We don't wear feathers and molt them off."

I remember that Gypsy Rose Lee hosted an afternoon talk show in the 60's, and she always brought her knitting with her on the show!