If you’re 60+ this will bring back memories. If you’re younger, it should give you a chuckle. If you’re a teenager, it will give you ammunition next time an adult tries to tell you that you should speak English, like they grew up doing. [Thanks to Linda Younts for sending me this, which I’ve slightly modified. She knows how much I love word-play.]
Lost Words From Our Childhood, words gone as fast as the buggy whip!
- Mergatroyd! as in Heavens to Mergatroyd!
- Jalopy…as in I drove a jalopy when I was young.
- Hunky Dory…as in I hope you are Hunky Dory after you read this and chuckle
Then there are those expressions that have become obsolete because of the inexorable march of technology:
- Don’t touch that dial
- Carbon copy
- You sound like a broken record
- [He was] hung out to dry
And how we’d describe people and actions:
- [He has] a lot of moxie
- [We’d put on our best] bib and tucker [to] straighten up and fly right
- [We accused people of being] a knucklehead [or] a nincompoop, [or] a pill
- [He’s] in like Flynn [and] living the life of Riley
- [I wouldn’t do that]–not for all the tea in China!
- We’d see signs (and write graffiti saying “Kilroy was here”
Or all those expressions now replaced by “the ‘F’ word”:
- Heavens to Betsy!
- Gee whillikers!
- Jumping Jehoshaphat!
- Holy moley!
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 as omnipresent as oxygen, have vanished with scarcely a notice from our tongues and our pens and our keyboards.
My comment: I wouldn’t mind going back to an era when we had a whole bunch of expressions rather than a few socially questionable ones that try to cover all situations–and fail.