WORDS AND PHRASES REMIND US OF: 'THE WAY WE
WORD' by Richard Lederer
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
'cool', or 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 with
scarcely a notice from our tongues and our pens and our keyboards.
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. T hink
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 Murgatroid! And away-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. We can have archaic and eat it, too.
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