Posted on 01/08/2019 3:57:41 AM PST by sodpoodle
Words gone as fast as the buggy whip! Sad really! The other day a not so elderly (65) lady said something to her son about driving a Jalopy and he looked at her quizzically and said what the heck is a Jalopy? OMG (new phrase!) he never heard of the word jalopy!! She knew she was old but not that old…
Well, I hope you are Hunky Dory after you read this and chuckle..
About a month ago, I illuminated some 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.” Back in the olden days we had a lot of moxie. We’d put on our best bib and tucker to straighten up and fly right.
Heavens to Betsy! Gee whillikers! Jumping 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.
We wake up from what surely has been just a short nap, and before we can say, well 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, go the words of our youth, the words we’ve left behind. We blink, and they’re gone. Where have all those phrases gone?
Long gone: Pshaw, The milkman did it. Hey! It’s your nickel. Don’t forget to pull the chain. Knee high to a grasshopper. Well, Fiddlesticks! Going like sixty. I’ll see you in the funny papers. Don’t take any wooden nickels. Heavens to Murgatroyd! It turns out there are more of these lost words and expressions than Carter has liver pills.
This can be disturbing stuff ! 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.
See ya later, alligator, after a while crocodile!
Many of these were in the old cartoons and movies we watched when we were kids in the sixties. That’s how I knew them. And my grandparents and parents used some of them too, of course.
I didn’t know that.
I ‘dialed’ up a buddy on the ‘Ameche’. Told him if I didn’t get a raise I was gone, ‘ Claude Raines’. He said ‘ Boss’, ‘Groovy’.
“...tight as Dick’s hat band.”
As a fan of the TV series Gunsmoke, I enjoy what I call “Festusisms”
“Goll-y-bill”
“You old scudder”
“Faster than you can say ‘rat run over the roof with a piece of raw liver in its mouth’”
“The the real McCoy was the scotch whiskey smuggled into the US by Capt Willy McCoy during the era of prohibition. Only McCoy’s whiskey was the real stuff.”
Supposedly...
You can’t “drop a dime” on some Ne’er-do-well any more either.
Me late father was renowned in family lore as being tight with a buck, which was mostly for show.
One of his favorite sayings was...”When I let go of the nickel, the buffalo can poop” or in more polite company...”When I let go of a nickel, Jefferson can take a breath”
Regards
alfa6 ;>}
Entropy... In thermodynamics, entropy (usual symbol S) is a measure of the number of specific realizations or microstates that may realize a thermodynamic system in a defined state specified by macroscopic variables. Most understand entropy as a measure of molecular disorder within a macroscopic system. The second law of thermodynamics states that an isolated system's entropy never decreases.
Say what..???
I always tell my kids “Don’t take any wooden nickels.”
Exactly!
...I remember “gay” when it had no perverse meaning..
= = = = = = = = = = =
Also a dike was something the little boy put his finger in to keep the sea from flooding Holland.
Not for all the tea in China!
Guess ‘we’ were the first ‘smart arse generation’ as the retort to that ‘tea in China’ was “BUT it comes from Ceylon”
and trans was the start of the word for that window OVER the door,
Riding in the rumble seat - the rumble seat was replaced with ‘SHOTGUN’ - (I GOT the passenger side FRONT window)
There was a MALE and FEMALE to select from and the plumbing better match the ‘person’ in a rest room (or lavatory or head)
Andy Griffith’s Mayberry character’s always used great southern terms = the accents were hilarious.
Gomer “Citizen’s Arrest”.
tight as the bark on a tree
‘Our Hearts Were Young And Gay’.......Cornelia Otis Skinner
That's one theory. The most widely accepted theory is it refers to the first automatic lubricators for the locomotive. When copies arrived, the original was referred to as the "Real McCoy".
The Flynn phrase is “supposedly,” too, but it first appeared at the right time and in the right context (show-business reporting) to support the claim.
What the Hell is a whipersnaper?
Never figured that out.
I’m speaking philosophically.
The reason those words are gone is that the current residents of this country came from elsewhere where those words were not a part of their cultural collective.
This is what it means for a country to lose its national identity. This is what the yellow vests in France are protesting, the feeling of being displaced in their own nation.
This loss of words is a sign of a disconnect with our heritage.
-PJ
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