Things come back. Thin ties.
Cat-eye glasses. Cocktails. Writers.
Expect fins on cars. My fashion
dowsing rod is pulling toward the double-breasted jacket…again. (I must check in the closet in the hope
Darling hasn’t Goodwill-ed my navy blue Donna Karen double-breasted
blazer! Classic; just a hint of shoulder
pad.) Go further and bring back the
“Hollywood Roll,” a double-breast style from the early 50s with a long, wide
lapel and one button near the belly. Not
to mention, a nifty pun.
I have designs on the
fashion of language and call for some of that old-time slang to reappear and,
to put into the closet warn out, threadbare, contemporary slang. ‘Whatever’ - needs a moratorium. Says
you! Get out! Who cares? Tell me another! ‘Get a life’, can go buh-bye, as well. Most of us use popular words and phrases as
linguistic, trendy shorthand; it can be fun and current. But, ‘24/7?’
Round-the-clock. Habitual. Ceaseless.
If I never hear ‘the whole nine
yards’ again, I will be relieved. (What
does that mean, when you think about it?)
‘Whole enchilada’ isn’t any great shakes, either.
I’ve begun to seed my
conversations and missives with jargon from various eras. It’s time for ‘dude’ to take a hinge and to bring
back cat. Cat has some dignity and edge. It’s jazz age. ‘Cool’ is the black of slang: you can’t go
wrong using the word and I was delighted it reentered the scene many years back. It may be irreplaceable, like, ‘like’ (talk
about overuse), or OK. That’s
hunky-dory. Why not vary it with keen, neat, hip, ace, top-notch, the berries,
ducky, or copacetic? (From
Copacabana.) ‘Right on’ surfaced during
the millennium and ‘totally’ blew me away. Utterly. Flat-out. Sheer. Purely. Indubitable. Anyway, we sound Swedish when we say, “toe-tahlee.”
I had to explain, and produce
confirmation, to convince Kid, a college sophomore, that And, how! is a legitimate old time expression for You bet! Right on! Indeed! She’d never heard it used or come across it
reading. (So many ways you can spin that
one, too: Annnnd, how! And, HOW!) When I was a boy and saw the film “The Music
Man,” I got a hoot out of Robert Preston warning the town folk of River City to
watch out for words sneaking into their kid’s conversation. “Words like – swell.” At which point the chorus of folk all gasp! I’ve been using swell, recently. It takes
people a back, at first. They’re not
sure what I’m saying, or whether I’m being sarcastic. Not all of the old-fashion slang is wimpy. I’ve commandeered one from my dad. He would use balls as we use crap, hell, damn, give me a break, or even shit. Perhaps, bull
would be a back-up if balls is too hairy.
My mother, if I overstepped, would say, “Don’t give me any sass!”
Isn’t that the cat’s pajamas? If she felt someone was a pain in the ass,
she’d say they were a pill.
“Just sayin’!’, ‘no
offense’ but we could all endeavor to be a little bit more creative, and if we
can’t find an old-fashioned word, create a new idiom, with the proviso that at
soon as you hear your invention said back to you, drop it, and find another. In the nineties it was rather dear to hear a
masculine man use ‘sweet’ for nice. My
11 year old nephew says ‘awesome’ is passé and epic is now. ‘Shut up!’ I recently attended a national sales seminar,
where our trainer sprinkled modern idioms like confetti. ‘Oh. My. God’, he used ‘Really?’ in that
sarcastic manner of you gotta be kidding,
forty-seven times in four hours. ‘Seriously?’ The first dozen, I thought, well, he has the
lingo to show he’s au courant…then, after a while, I started counting them and (‘Duh!’)
not listening to his message. ‘Shoot me
now.’
When you get down to it,
many idioms are pejorative, hurtful denigrations, and require a more serious
discussion than I am up for. It’s certainly
demeaning to refer to a young woman as a ‘babe’, or a ‘chick’, and so many terms
we all should stop using and perpetuating.
Euphemistically, older isn’t necessarily better: tomato, dish, toots,
chica, skank, bushpig, fox, woofer, sea donkey. (Old joke – so old nobody gets it: Why are
mother-in-laws like seeds? You don’t
really need ‘em but they come with the tomatah.) Skirt?
Dame? (When it comes to a broad, I’m
a gam man, myself. But, then I’m a
closet dick. That is, I read old
detective novels.) There are instances
where slang, a diminutive, shouldn’t be applied in gender, race, religion;
respect should trump our baser motives.
Repressing the use of the word won’t make the hate go away. Sad, isn’t it?
Admittedly, old nomenclature
may be just that: old and from an era that is best forgotten. I wouldn’t want to see ‘Boss!’ invigorated,
or ‘Groovy!?’ ‘Eew!’ ‘Get out!’
Trends can overwhelm our creative, snappy spirit and soon what seemed ‘fresh’,
‘dope’, ‘sick’, ‘rad’, jaunty, raw, crisp,
recent, or just plain catchy, is spoiled
forever; its very uniqueness, old hat. (Does
every ‘dork’ sport a pork-pie, now?)
Anon, James
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