I enjoyed reading Richard Lederer’s OLD WORDS AND PHRASES REMIND US OF THE
WAY WE ‘WORD'” –phrases from the past — and I think I had heard all and
used most. How time flies and how fast the dictionary becomes obsolete!
Lederer writes:
“About a month ago, I illuminated old expressions that have become obsolete
because of the inexorable march of technology. These phrases included: don’t
touch that dial, carbon copy, you sound like a broken record and hung out to
dry. A bevy of readers have asked me to shine light on more faded words and
expressions, and I am happy to oblige:
Back in the olden days we had a lot of moxie. We’d put on our best bib and
tucker and straighten up and fly right. Hubba-hubba!
We’d cut a rug in some juke joint and then go necking and petting and
smooching and spooning and billing and cooing and pitching woo in hot rods
and jalopies in some passion pit or lovers’ lane.
Heavens to Betsy! Gee whillikers! Jumpin’ Jehoshaphat! Holy Moley! We were
in like Flynn and living the life of Riley, and even a regular guy couldn’t
accuse us of being a knucklehead, a nincompoop or a pill (not for all the
tea in China)!
Back in the olden days, life used to be swell, but when’s the last time
anything was swell? Swell has gone the way of beehives, pageboys and the
D.A.; of spats, knickers, fedoras, poodle skirts, saddle shoes and pedal
pushers. Oh, my aching back. Kilroy was here, but he isn’t anymore.
Like Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle and Kurt Vonnegut’s Billy Pilgrim,
we have become unstuck in time. We wake up from what surely has been just a
short nap, and before we can say, “I’ll be a monkey’s uncle!” or “This is a
fine kettle of fish!” we discover that the words we grew up with, the words
that seemed omnipresent as oxygen, have vanished from our tongues and our
pens and our keyboards with scarcely a notice. Poof, poof, poof go the
words of our youth, the words we’ve left behind.
We blink, and they’re gone, evanesced from the landscape and wordscape of
our perception, like Mickey Mouse wristwatches, hula hoops, skate keys,
candy cigarettes, little wax bottles of colored sugar water and an organ
grinder’s monkey.
Where have all those phrases gone? Long time passing. Where have all those
phrases gone? Long time ago (Pshaw).
The milkman did it. Think about the starving Armenians. Bigger than a bread
box. Banned in Boston. The very idea!
It’s your nickel. Don’t forget to pull the chain. Knee high to a
grasshopper. Turn-of-the-century. Iron curtain. Domino theory.
Fail safe. Civil defense. Fiddlesticks! You look like the wreck of the
Hesperus. Cooties. Going like sixty. I’ll see you in the funny papers. Don’t
take any wooden nickels. Heavens to Murgatroyd! And awa-a-ay we go! Oh, my
stars and garters!
It turns out there are more of these lost words and expressions than Carter
had liver pills. This can be disturbing stuff, this winking out of the words
of our youth, these words that lodge in our heart’s deep core. But just as
one never steps into the same river twice, one cannot step into the same
language twice. Even as one enters, words are swept downstream into the
past, forever making a different river.
We of a certain age have been blessed to live in changeful times. For a
child each new word is like a shiny toy, a toy that has no age. We at the
other end of the chronological arc have the advantage of remembering there
are words that once did not exist and there were words that once strutted
their hour upon the earthly stage and now are heard no more, except in our
collective memory. It’s one of the greatest advantages of aging.
~~
Dr Bob Griffin
[email protected] www.grif.net
“Jesus Knows Me, This I Love!”