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Good grief! Old-school phrases are da bomb

By Ed Hayes, The Orlando Sentinel, Source: MCT News Service

Back when I was knee-high to a grasshopper...

Whoa, hold on there a second, pardner. Is that what I meant to say? Where'd that phrase come from anyway? Never before had I applied it in this space _ not to my recollection.

Still, they were the first words to spill from my fingertips this morning as I pulled up my swivel chair for this weekly interlocution with you. Last night, my wife and I spent some quality time in the home of my 83-year-old kid brother and his ageless wife, so I suppose that has something to do with my present mental impetus.

Also on hand were two welcome, enchanting, surprise visitors from St. Louis, my niece and her daughter. Ah, and didn't we have a grand time. Laughter, the night's theme.

Yes, and so it should be, delectably, when relatives gather _ preferably not for a funeral _ and dust off the old family stories, the funnier and more outrageously embarrassing the better.

My great-niece, in her glorious 20s, and seemingly relishing every second of her existence, might've been the luckiest individual at the dinner table because she'd not heard our nostalgic valedictions before.

And I must say that some of our old yarns have aged gracefully _ with a light sprinkle of forgivable hyperbole. Undoubtedly it's the same with your dear ones.

Gosh, we stayed up merrymaking till all hours. I reckon the missus and I didn't head for home until, well, gee-whiz, about 9 o'clock.

OK, so drifting back to the opening sentence of this column, I've been musing, not merely about the memories themselves, rather about words. And I wonder if we elders used any individual words or phrases that sounded unfamiliar or downright quaint to my lively, lovely great-niece.

Such as? Oh, I don't know. Well, such handy expressions as holy mackerel, holy catfish, holy criminy, holy smoke, golly, drop dead, oh dear, so's your old man, baloney, gee-whiz, son of a gun, dang, darn, shoot, my stars, man alive, go fly a kite, get lost, and leapin' lizards.

We just don't hear those grand, clean, simple expletives anymore. Confidentially, such verbiage would be laughed off the air _ to borrow from radio's golden era.

Most generations introduce new words, or so-called streamlined versions of existing language. As the years skid by, the dictionary gains weight. In some instances, even definitions flip-flop. Remember when a certain wedge of the populace substituted the word bad whenever it meant good?

What hurts me most, I reckon, is that the language of too many of our bright young people has turned absolutely vulgar.

Come on, boys and girls, you can do better than that, for crying out loud.

___

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