Photo by Camerique/Retrofile
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The Way We Word
By Richard Lederer, March & April 2005
Remembering the long-lost, super-swell, peachy-keen lingo of our neat and nifty youth
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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 in
(depending on when we were making all that whoopee) flivvers, tin
lizzies, roadsters, hot rods, and jalopies in some passion pit or
lovers' lane. Heavens to Betsy! 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 was a real gas, a doozy, a dilly, and
a pip; flipsville, endsville, the bee's knees, the cat's
whiskers, the cat's meow, and the cat's pajamas; far-out,
nifty, neat, groovy, ducky, beautiful, fabulous, super, wicked,
terrif, and copacetic. Life used to be swell, but when's the
last time anything was swell? Swell has gone the way of
beehives, pageboys, and the DA (duck's ass), of spats,
knickers, fedoras, poodle skirts, 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,
our keyboards, our pens. 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 the phrases gone? Long time ago: Pshaw. The milkman did
it. Think about the starving Armenians. Bigger than a breadbox.
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. Third World.
Fail-safe. Fiddlesticks! You look like the wreck of the
Hesperus. Going like sixty. I'll see you in the funny
papers. Don't take any wooden nickels. 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.
The world spins faster, and the speed of technical advance can
make us dizzy. It wasn't that long ago that, in the course of
a typical lifetime, only the cast of characters playing out the
human drama changed. Now it seems the text of the play itself is
revised every day.
Hail and farewell to rumble seats and running boards. Iceboxes
and Frigidaires. Victrolas and hi-fis. Fountain pens and
inkwells. Party lines. Test patterns. Tennis presses. Slide
rules. Manual typewriters. Corrasable Bond. Ditto for Photostats
and mimeographs. (Do you, like me, remember that turpentiney
smell of the mimeo fluid?)
The inexorable advance of technology shapes our culture and the
language that reflects it. We used to watch the tube, but
televisions aren't made of tubes anymore, so that figure of
speech has disappeared. We used to dial telephone numbers and
dial up people and places. Now that almost all of us have
converted from rotary to push-button phones, we search for a new
verb—"Sorry, I must have pushed the wrong
number"; "I think I'll punch up Doris";
"I've got to index-finger the Internal Revenue
Service"; Press M for Murder—and watch
dial dying on the vine. With modern radios, can the demise
of "Don't touch that dial!" be far behind?
How many more years do hot off the press, hung out to
dry, put through the wringer, and shift into high
gear have, now that we no longer print with hot lead, hang
wet clothes on clotheslines, and operate wringer washing machines
and stick-shift automobiles? Do I sound like a broken record? Do
you think I must have been vaccinated with a phonograph needle?
In our high-tech times, these metaphors fade away, like sepia
photographs in a family album.
Technology has altered our sense of the size of the world and the
things in it. Remember the thrill your family felt owning that
six-inch black-and-white, rabbit-eared television set (soon to be
known as the boob tube and idiot box)? Keep the
lights off. No talking, please!
Today more and more TV screens are upward of 40 inches. We drive
bigger cars, live in bigger homes, eat bigger meals, and inhabit
bigger bodies. I am six foot three and used to be called a
six-footer. Now the NBA is studded with at least a dozen
seven-footers, and outstanding female athletes such as Lisa
Leslie and Venus Williams regularly and majestically top six
feet, so six-footer has lost its magic.
How to respond to the supersizing of America? That's the $64
dollar question. The $64 question was the highest award in the
1940s radio quiz show Take It or Leave It. By the 1950s,
inflation had set in, and $64 no longer seemed wondrous. Then in
1955 came The $64,000 Question. The popularity of the show
helped the $64,000 question become a metaphor for a question
whose answer could solve all our problems, but the expression has
faded from use because that once sumptuous figure no longer
impresses us.
While our bodies and possessions have expanded, our world has
grown smaller. Remember that admonition
"Shhh—I'm on long distance!"? Phrases
like long distance and coast to coast used to hold
such excitement for us. Now we take them for granted, so we
hardly ever use them.
Nor do we use the likes of mailman, fireman,
waiter, and workman's compensation. We have
fashioned letter carrier, firefighter,
server, and worker's
compensation—genderless terms that avoid setting males
as the norm and females as aberrations from that norm.
When's the last time you heard or uttered the word
stewardess? Now those women and (increasingly) men who try
to make us comfortable as we hurtle through the air packed in a
winged sardine can have transmogrified into flight attendants.
Isn't it wonderful to live in an age when a flight attendant
can make a pilot pregnant?
This degendering of our language reflects the new realities of
our lives and a growing respect for women. Remember
housewife and homemaker? Now we call such a woman a
stay-at-home mom, respecting her choice to fill such a
crucial role. Remember how we used to taunt other kids with
"Your mother wears combat [or army] boots!"? These days
your mother could very well be wearing combat boots!
And we've grown more sensitive about other areas of life.
Whither spinsters and old maids,
divorcées, illegitimate children,
cripples, midgets, and the deaf and dumb?
Gone, too, are Bowery bums and tramps and
hoboes. They've left the neighborhood and been
replaced by transients and the
homeless—kinder, gentler, less judgmental words that
recognize that people living on the street or in the woods
usually haven't made some sort of lazy choice to be there.
At the same time, we're more blunt about things. Did women
get pregnant when I was a lad? Not that I recall. Pregnant
was too graphic for polite company. Women, instead, were in a
family way or expecting. What they were expecting was
a visit from the stork.
At the risk of being labeled a geezer, fogy, and curmudgeon,
I'll say right here that this modern bluntness is accompanied
by a loss of manners. Have you noticed that a certain polite
acknowledgment from our youth has gone far south? That statement
is "You're welcome." I'm sitting at a table in
a restaurant, and I ask the server for extra lemon with my tea.
He or she returns with those slices and I say, "Thank
you." How does the server respond? Not with "You're
welcome," but with "No problem." No problem?
I'm sure I'm not the only one who wants to grab the
server by the collar and hiss, "You're darned right
it's no problem. It's your job!"
During the past century, the English language has added an
average of 900 new words a year. As newly minted words have added
to the currency of our language, the meanings of the words we
grew up with have changed under our eyes and ears. A hunk
no longer means simply a large lump of something, and rap
isn't just '60s talk. Crack means more than a
small opening, ice more than frozen water, and pot
more than a cooking utensil. A bar code is no longer
ethics for lawyers or the etiquette of behavior in a café;
a pound is no longer just a unit of currency or
measurement but that tipsy ticktacktoe game that sits above the
three on your keyboard or below the nine on your telephone.
Remember when IBM was something a two-year-old might say
to a parent? The computer, the most deeply striking technology of
our lifetime, has powerfully challenged our sense of so many
hitherto uncomplicated words—backup, bit,
boot, crash, disk, hacker,
icon, mail, memory, menu,
mouse, scroll, spam, virus, and
window.
Of all the words that have undergone a semantic shift this past
half-century, the one that rattles more cages and yanks more
chains is gay. We grew up with gay as an adjective that
meant "exuberant, high-spirited," as in the Gay
Nineties and gay divorcée. But in the second
half of the 20th century, gay began traveling the linguistic path
of specialization, making the same journey as words such as
chauvinism, segregation, comrade, and
colored. Shortly after World War II, activists popularized
the concept of Gay Liberation—and many heterosexuals have
lamented that a perfectly wonderful word has been wordnapped by
the homosexual community.
But as much as heteros believe they need gay, the gay
community needs it more—as an emblem of self-esteem, as a
more fulfilling word than homosexual—because it
communicates a culture rather than concentrating on sexual
orientation. For those who lament the loss of gay, I recommend
that henceforth they be merry.
This can be disturbing stuff, this winking out of the words of
our youth. 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 that there are words that once
did not exist and 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.
Richard Lederer's latest book is The Revenge of
Anguished English (St. Martin's Press, 2005). He
cohosts A Way With Words on public radio.
Now, take our web-exclusive quiz to see how well you remember
selected words—and their origins—from your youth.
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