Ol’ Nevah and I put a little pizzaz into our recent dual birthdays by attending a country music concert featuring Sammy Kershaw, the legendary c/w artist from Louisiana. The concert wuz held at the elaborately ornate Granada Theater in Emporia and it wuz a delight because the seats were comfy and the seating wuz roomy. Our seats were five rows from the stage, so we could see Sammy and his band pretty up close and personal.
The place wuz packed with the majority of the crowd old-timers like me who still enjoy good old time country music. Although Mr. Kershaw is definitely part of the over-the-hill gang of c/w artists, he still put on an entertaining concert.
Plus, the best part is that it wuz announced that one of my favorite old-time country artists, John Anderson, will be in concert at the Grenada in March. We plan to buy tickets to that performance for sure.
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When I travel and stop at some convenience store, I usually buy a Skor candy bar for the road. I love ‘em. However, when I recently had to pony up well over a buck for that candy bar, I got to thinking about America’s eating priorities.
I sell farm fresh eggs to my friends for a bargain $1.50 a dozen. That comes to 12.5-cents per egg. Now, I’m sure there’s a lot more good nutrition in one egg than in a candy bar, but the price is only a small fraction as much.
Wonder how many eggs I’d sell if I priced them like candy bars and sold a dozen eggs for $12? Not many I’d bet.
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And old friend from Royal Valley, Wash., out in the Columbia Basin, Balin Hayes, recently e-mailed me an interesting piece of humor (and education), written by a local linguist Richard Lederer, that I’m sure you old geezers and geezerettes like me will enjoy. It’s about words and phrases from our youth that have virtually disappeared from our modern conversations. The piece is entitled:
OLD WORDS AND PHRASES REMIND US OF THE WAY WE WORD”
“About a month ago in this space, I illuminated 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 tried to 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 willikers! Jumpin’ 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 or a nincompoop. 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, 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 grinder’s 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. 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! Oh, my stars and garters! 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.”
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Wonderful stuff. I grew up with most of those words and phrases — and still use some of them.
I’ll give up the ghost for this week with a few wise words about language. Novelist and futurist George Orwell said, “Political language … is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to p
