This was written by Richard Lederer & sent to me be Susan at I Think, Therefore I Yam. I am grateful to them both!!
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 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. 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. We can have
archaic and eat it, too.
How can you look up a word in the dictionary when you don't know how to spell it?----fishducky
