Great piece to remember WHEN.
A not so elderly (65) lady said something to her son about driving aJalopy and he looked at her quizzically and asked what the heck is a Jalopy?
OMG (new phrase!) he never heard of the word jalopy!!
>
> So they went to the computer and pulled up a picture from the movie “The
Grapes of Wrath.” Now that was a Jalopy!
>
> 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.” 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! 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.
>
> 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
grinders 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!
>
> 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.
>
> See ya later, alligator!
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