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.
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 changeable 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!
“Well! Doesn’t that just rot your socks?!”
Confused
I became confused when I heard the word “Service” used with these agencies:
Internal Revenue ‘Service’
U.S. Postal ‘Service’
Telephone ‘Service’
Cable / TV ‘Service’
Civil ‘Service’
City, County & State Public ‘Service’
Customer ‘Service’
This is not what I thought ‘Service’ meant.
But today, I overheard two farmers talking, and one of them said he had hired a bull to ‘Service’ a few cows.
BAM!!! It all came into focus.
Now I understand what all those agencies are doing.
I hope that you are now just as enlightened as I am.
Frigidaire...
Outhouse
It's nothing to write home about.
And what ever happened to doohickey bobbers? You never hear that one anymore.
I still hear them say ‘don’t touch that dial’ on radio, even Internet Radio.
Soda jerk. Penny candy.
You’re the bees knees!
And then there was the Flinstons “...you’ll have a gay old time”. But some terms/phrases remain eternal such as “FU democrats”!
After while, crocodile.
Groovy man
hark!
Now that was “the bee’s knees”!
It was also “he best thing since sliced bread”!
Hillary has “bats in her belfry”.
***sigh***
Even sadder is that many of them do not know what it means to have truly free speech.
If you see a tall man standing next to a short man, and refer to them as “Mutt and Jeff”, people under the age of 45 will have no idea what you are talking about.
Well, 23 skee doo!
He/She is such a dope.
Feeling Groovy.
Hung out to dry.
Someone used to say battle axe...but I don’t know what that meant....
Hob nob.
Thanks to monthly semipro tournaments in the SF Bay Area, I'd make from $40-$50 on those weekends, in addition to the $10-$15 I made during the week. That wasn't bad in the late 60s.
Thanks to the hours I spent at the alley, I became quite proficient in playing pinball. My ROTC "handle" was "Pinball Wizard", i.e. my call sign on weekend exercises. I was awarded it after my friends saw my skills at a bar near campus. lol