Faster Times February 25, 2010

Ralph Keyes is the author of fifteen books, but in some ways his most recent one—“I Love It When You Talk Retro: Hoochie Coochie, Double Whammy, Drop a Dime, and the Forgotten Origins of American Speech”—seems like the one he was born to write. Having authored the 1977 exploration “Is There Life After High School?” (which was adapted into a musical that ran briefly on Broadway, and is still regularly produced around the country) and boasting an impressive, unexpected personal collection of vintage toasters, Keyes is clearly fascinated with the past. This latest book puts that preoccupation to practical use, giving us a tour of the often strange and sticky origins of the things we say—and can’t stop saying.

“I Love it When You Talk Retro” is a guide to the traces of history that lace our daily conversations, bringing together a vast array of “retroterms” with wildly different meanings and origins. These “verbal fossils”—like “red tape,” “carpetbagger,” “the 800-pound gorilla,” and “ditto”—all have their own stories, which often fall away after they start being regularly used. As we get further from their sources, we become more alienated from what we’re saying.

The past sneaks into our present in unexpected ways, and often we don’t even realize our part in perpetuating it. There’s something poignant about the idea that so much of what we say derives from things that are lost, obsolete, or misunderstood. “I Love it When You Talk Retro” is a dictionary of pseudo-foreign phrases, a bridge between generations, and a serious treat for word nerds. I talked to Keyes about why retroterms matter, why Boomers speak in code, and why we’re all still haunted by high school.

You look at a huge number of terms in this book. How did you choose which ones to explore?

For years I’ve been jotting things down as I heard them. I’d think, “How would my kids know what that means? How would a new immigrant understand the context of that phrase?” Whenever I would hear something that raised that question, I’d make a note of it. Eventually it was a list of thousands.

From there, what was your research process like?

I started out planning to do pop culture: TV shows, song lyrics, old ads. The more I got into it, the more I realized how many words and phrases went a lot further back than that. The book just about killed me. I ended up with a manuscript about three times as long as it was supposed to be.

Many of the phrases I was thinking about were the ones you think everyone knows—like “waiting for the other shoe to drop”—but invariably, you find out they don’t. Or they might know what it means, but they don’t know where it came from. Then I began to see ones I hadn’t heard of myself: Paul Krugman wrote, “There must be a pony in there somewhere,” as a way of referring to unwarranted optimism. I’d never heard of it before, so I looked it up and found a huge number of references to this story: A young boy is confronted by a huge mound of manure, and rather than being put off like most of us, he dives right in. Someone asks him why, and he says, “With this much manure, there must be a pony in there somewhere.”

I’ve been keeping more recent track of Maureen Dowd—I call her the Queen of Retrotalk, because she’s constantly using retroterms. But she’s not unique. Reporters of a certain age are constantly tossing around these Boomer-era allusions as if everyone knows what they refer to.

It’s partly a matter of style: She’s trying to brand herself as a certain kind of writer with a certain kind of knowledge. I guess she assumes that it’s an advantage, but you’re pointing out that it can really be alienating.

I compare it to talking to someone who’s always throwing French or Latin phrases into conversation. It always makes me feel left out and ignorant. I think, in a way, that’s part of the point—when those of my generation make reference to things that we grew up with, we’re as much as saying to people a lot younger than us, “This is a private conversation. If you don’t know what we’re talking about, the heck with you. Haven’t you got some twittering to do?” It becomes a kind of a generational freeze-out, a way of, probably unconsciously, celebrating generational solidarity–especially for Boomers.

How important do you think it is for us to know the roots of these expressions? Well, it keeps you in the conversation.

I don’t think it’s an imperative. It makes you more cognizant of what’s being discussed around you. And it’s more fun to know what they refer to: we get the gist of a lot of these things, but we don’t necessarily know their origins.

I knew what “gerrymander” meant—to fiddle with the shape of a congressional district to favor one candidate or another—but I had no idea where it came from. It turns out it goes back to the early 19th century, when the governor of Massachusetts, Eldridge Gerry, presided over a redistricting and some very weirdly shaped districts [resulted]. A cartoonist drew a picture of a congressional district shaped like a salamander, and he called it the “Gerry-mander.” It caught on. A lot of these phrases come out of events, and then they’re kind of fun to say, and nothing better comes along to replace them, so we still talk about them.

The Boomers’ frame of reference is very TV-centric, because they spent so much time in front of the television. It raises an interesting question: What will be the retroterms of the Internet generation? My son, who’s 23, spends a lot more time in front of a computer screen than a TV screen. Probably a lot of the phrases he’ll use will confound his grandkids, and will come out of the Internet and computer-ese.

It does seem like a never-ending cycle of misunderstandings.

My kids are seven years apart—one’s 30 and one’s 23—and I think phrases familiar to the older one aren’t necessarily familiar to the younger one. It used to take a generation for terms to become obsolete, but as everything else is accelerating, I think the rate at which terms become obsolete has accelerated.

At the same time, the Internet keeps a more public, centralized record of what things used to mean, which could be helpful.

Yeah, it’s so easy to look things up now. That was one problem I had writing this book. I’ve been writing word or quotation-oriented books for a couple of decades, but twenty years ago it meant a lot of traipsing around the library, making phone calls, reading old magazines and newspapers—which was very demanding, but it was a real detective game. Then, the challenge was to maximize your data. Now you have a whole different challenge, which is to minimize, to put borders on what you’re accessing.

What inspired you to write your book “Is There Life After High School?”

I had all these strong leftover feelings about high school, and my classmates, about what happened to me there, and what I wish had happened. I remember walking down the path to the mailbox and coming back with an envelope that said up in the corner “CHS Class of ’62,” and I opened it up and unfolded this piece of paper and it said, “Reunion Time!” This was ten years after I’d graduated. My hands started trembling, my heart started pounding, my cheeks were flushed. I was struck by how strong my feelings were, my ambivalence about going to a reunion. I mean, for crying out loud, it’s high school, ten years ago—why is my heart racing?

I started talking to friends and reading up on celebrities about their high school experiences. Everyone I talked to had their own memories and resentments and second thoughts and regrets, things they wish they hadn’t said, things they wish they had said, people they wish they could have gone out with, fights they wish they had won…the list is endless. I called up Robert Logue, and said, “Mr. Logue, I hear you’re the guy who beat Richard Nixon for Senior Class president at Whittier High School in the 30’s.” There was a long pause at the other end of the line. He says, “That was student body president.” So we really do remember, and I was really able to unload the weight of my high school memories by writing that book.

Tell me about your toaster collection. Why toasters?

My mother-in-law had this gorgeous, shiny sunbeam toaster from 1938. I always admired it. One day we went to visit her and the toaster wasn’t in the kitchen. I asked where it was, and she said, “Oh, it broke, I threw it down the incinerator.” That turns out to be a common collectors’ syndrome, where something you really wanted got away from you, and you try to replace it. So I kept my eyes open for other toasters. There are serious toaster collectors out there; they have a toaster collectors association, they have a newsletter, they hold conventions. I try to just have fun with it, and I try not to spend too much money on my toasters. As you can see from the pictures, I’ve got, I think, about sixty at this point. I also have hairdryers and blenders and cocktail shakers and waffle irons and stuff like that.

I think I’m a 30’s guy, even though I was born in ‘45. There’s something about that whole pre-war era that fascinates me. Some of the design of the early toasters is phenomenal—they’re just chrome-y and curvy and shiny…I just like them. And I love showing off my toasters to visitors to our house. We go down to the basement, and there’s this reaction like, “what in the world are you collecting toasters for?” But they love to go over there and see, “Oh, we used to have one like this!”

Incidentally, I tried to get a book together called the “Tao of Toasters,” about the role toasters play in our culture. My agent didn’t think she could sell it.

***

Eryn Loeb has written for the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Village Voice, Time Out New York, Salon, Bookforum, the L Magazine, and Bitch Magazine, among other publications, and is a contributing editor for Tablet Magazine. Since 2005, she has written the ”Girl, Interrupting” column for Bookslut.com, taking a monthly look at how feminism lives (and dies) on the page. She lives in New York.

History News Network

Ralph Keyes

Our national conversation is filled with historical allusions: Ponzi schemes, smoke-filled rooms, talking turkey, even Harry and Louise (to say nothing of Thelma and Louise). Those who know the history of these allusions tend to assume everyone else does. But everyone doesn’t. Younger inquiring minds want to know: Who was Hobson and what was his choice? Why does zipless have sexual overtones? What’s the big deal about drinking Kool-Aid? And who is this Cher Noble that newscasters keep referring to when they discuss nuclear power plants?

When we use such retro-references, history provides the platform that we speak from. Or, one might say, the stump. Early settlers who saw Indian leaders addressing tribe members while standing on a stump adopted the practice themselves, giving what we still call stump speeches.

Much political terminology is rooted in long-forgotten events, reaching as far back as Elbridge Gerry. A signer of the Declaration of Independence and onetime vice president, as governor of Massachusetts Gerry presided over the redrawing of his state’s congressional districts in 1812. Gerry’s party designed these districts to favor themselves. Their results were quite creative. A Boston Gazette cartoon portrayed one reconfigured district shaped like a dragon-salamander. It was called “the Gerry-mander: A New Species of Monster.” This term caught the public’s fancy. Converted to a verb, gerrymander is what we still call the tortured redrawing of electoral districts to favor those in power. It is a classic retroterm.

Retroterms refer to events from our past that made a big enough impression to stick around in memory. They are an excellent barometer of what mattered most to us during a given period of history: what resonated, struck our fancy, or simply tickled our funny bone.

One colonial-era tale involved a white hunter and an Indian hunter who join forces to shoot several crows and wild turkeys. When it comes time to divide their catch, the white man gives his companion all the crows while keeping every turkey. The incensed Indian protests. “You talk all turkey for you,” he says. “You never once talk turkey for me! Now I talk turkey to you.” The Indian then takes his fair share of turkeys. This story was so popular in nineteenth-century America that talk turkey became synonymous with getting down to business.

Unlike turkey, crow is a notoriously unappetizing bird. At one time stories involving crow were a staple of American humor. For example: If lost in the woods, (1) Catch a crow. (2) Boil for a week with one of your boots. (3) Eat the boot. After the Civil War, those forced to admit an error were said to eat boiled crow. In 1885 an American magazine told its readers “To ‘eat crow’ means to recant, or to humiliate oneself.” It still does.

Such allusions are part and parcel of what I call retrotalk: conversational allusions to past phenomena. Even though American discourse is filled with historical references we assume “everyone’s heard of,” everyone hasn’t. Those who were born after what’s alluded to took place, who grew up in another country, or who simply don’t know what it refers to, get left out in the conversational cold. This suggests yet another reason for giving history greater prominence in our educational systems: Not just for its own inherent value but to facilitate conversation among young and old, historians and lay persons, the newly-arrived and those already here.

Most know that “The buck stops here” refers to the final point of responsibility. It’s common knowledge that this retrophrase comes from the old expression pass the buck. Far fewer realize that this phrase originated among frontier poker players who circulated a buck knife among themselves to indicate whose turn it was to deal and, presumably, to defend themselves if another player didn’t like the cards he was dealt. Timid souls who preferred not to deal at all passed the buck.

Barrels form the basis of an important subset of retrotalk. On nineteenth-century British ships, a wooden cask, or butt, held drinking water. Its lid had a dipping hole called a scuttle. The two pieces combined were called a scuttlebutt. As would later be true of office workers sipping water from water coolers, sailors commonly shared gossip beside these containers while quenching their thirst. In time scuttlebutt itself became synonymous with gossip, rumors, or inside information.

Other barrels aboard sailing ships held salted meat. Fat left over after that meat was cooked was called slush. Sometimes this rendered fat was sold to landlubbers on shore. The proceeds went into a slush fund to benefit crew members. Eventually that phrase came to characterize secret funds used for illicit purposes.

Barrels used to store pork used to be a common sight in American homes. The fuller the barrel, the richer its owner. Poor folks sometimes had to scrape the bottom of the barrel. That type of pig-based terminology is still heard routinely when politicians distribute money. Pork—or bringing home the bacon—signifies largesse. Pork barrel politics is based on accumulating and distributing public resources among backers and constituents.

Telling such stories provides a capital opportunity to relate history to everyday conversation. Word history can’t be divorced from social history. As Bill Bryson wrote in Made in America, “unless we understand the social context in which words are formed . . . we cannot begin to appreciate the richness and vitality of the words that make up our speech.” Rather than simply use retroterms and puzzle many listeners, exploring their origins give us a first-rate teaching moment.

Consider the case of stable owner Thomas Hobson.. A hearty coachman who lived well into his eighties, from 1568 until 1631 Hobson rented some forty horses to Cambridge University students. These young men had a tendency to return Hobson’s horses panting and covered with froth. As a result, his most popular steeds were getting worn out. To remedy this problem, Hobson came up with an ingenious solution. A returned horse went to the farthest stall of his stable, then moved up in turn. Customers could only rent the horse closest to the entryway (i.e., the freshest one). “This one or none” was his policy. Students sarcastically called that Hobson’s choice, meaning no choice at all. Thomas Ward’s 1688 poem “England’s Reformation,” included the line, “Where to elect there is but one, ’tis Hobson’s choice — take that or none.” When Henry Ford said Model T customers could have any color they liked, so long as it was black, he offered them a Hobson’s choice.

Sher-endipity

Many expressions we use as adults originated in the playgrounds, classrooms, and empty lots of our childhood. “Say uncle,” “connect the dots,” “stay within the lines,” and “stuck-up” are just a few.

The term hoodwink is left over from another children’s game, blindman’s buff (not “bluff”). In this traditional English game, the it person was blindfolded, slapped on the behind, or “buffed,” then made to stumble about trying to grab other players. Blindfolded participants were said to be hoodwinked. Originally, that term referred to having one’s eyes covered. Over time hoodwink came to mean “trick someone.”

Nowadays, students with digital wristwatches do not understand clockwise, counterclockwise and ‘a quarter to three’. Two forty-five they understand.

“Retroterms” from cootie to scuttlebutt are seldom understood but were often used by the older generation. When we use these terms, it’s with the assumption that everyone understands. However, that’s not always true.

Cootie, for example, is a word for lice that originated as soldier slang in World War I. Ralph Keyes is the author of the book I Love It When You Talk Retro. It takes a look at the stories behind the allusions that have — so far — stood the test of time.

The book takes an entertaining and informative look at the fashion and fads of our language. Today’s 18-year-olds may not know who Mrs. Robinson is, where the term “stuck in a groove” comes from, why 1984 was a year unlike any other.

“Big as a bread box” or what the term Watergate refers to are other examples. The book discusses these verbal fossils that remain embedded in our national conversation long after the topic they refer to has galloped off into the sunset.

It could be a person (Mrs. Robinson), product (Edsel), past bestseller (Catch-22), radio or TV show (The Shadow), comic strip (Pogo), or advertisement (Where’s the beef?) which are long forgotten.

The phrase “drinking the Kool-Aid” is a mystery to young people today, as is “45rpm.” Even older folks don’t know the origins of “raked over the coals” (originally in reference to the treatment of heretics) and “cut to the chase” (originated in the US film industry). Keyes uses his skill as a sleuth of sources to track what he calls “retrotalk”: “a slippery slope of puzzling allusions to past phenomena.”

He surveys the origins of “verbal fossils” from commercials (Kodak moment), jurisprudence (Twinkie defense), movies (pod people), cartoons (Caspar Milquetoast) and literature (Brave New World).

Many allusions or idioms come from an old game involving small round spheres made of clay, glass, ceramic, or stone. These, of course, are marbles. Marbles could be used in an infinite variety of games, but — in America, anyway — the most popular involved trying to knock each other’s marbles out of a circle drawn in the dirt.

Those playing this game, usually called Ringer, had to knuckle down, or squat on one knee with a knuckle on the ground, then propel a shooter into the ring from his hand. As adults, we say we’re ready to knuckle down, or get serious, as we once did when marbles were on the line. To knuckle under, on the other hand, is to succumb, much like the marble player yielding to an opponent’s demand that he shoot with knuckles inverted.

Players in some games played for keeps, or “keepsies.” Winners of those games kept every marble they could knock out of the ring. Another way of saying the same thing was going for all the marbles. In Ringer, as in life, this meant aspiring to all or nothing. Losing your marbles was infuriating of course, and is probably why we apply that phrase to out-of-control adults who have lost it.

It is great fun exploring the origins of our expressions

Something Good to Read

“Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read.” ~Groucho Marx

Malcolm Gladwell’s book about success, Outliers, is still selling like hotcakes. Go figure. Also writing about success, Tara Stiles at Huffington Post sets forth 10 tips for success in what I have to assume is an unintentionally funny post. Drink water and get enough sleep, she writes. Do yoga. Smile. Ms. Stiles seems to have a low threshold for declaring success. Her tips read more like preparation for life as a dancing bear rather than say, director of the FBI.

That Outliers is indeed “selling like hotcakes” reminds me that if you are a word maven, there is a new book that may be of interest: I Love It When You Talk Retro: Hoochie Coochie, Double Whammy, Drop a Dime, and the Forgotten Origins of American Speech by Ralph Keyes. Check out a NPR interview of Keyes here.