Author digs for origins of phrases that linger

Columbus Dispatch, March 29, 2009

By Joe Blundo

We're in a 21st-century economic crisis that's inspiring a lot of 20th-century talk.
President Obama, in dismissing those who say he's trying to do too much, remarked, "When you're president, you've got to walk and chew gum at the same time."

Forbes magazine described ailing Citigroup as a "basket case."

In lamenting the stimulus bill, Investors Business Daily brought up the old admonition against watching laws or sausage being made.

All are examples of what Ohioan Ralph Keyes calls "retroterms." They are "verbal artifacts that hang around in our national conversation long after the topic they refer to has galloped into the sunset."

Keyes -- the Yellow Springs author of The Quote Verifier, Is There Life After High School? and numerous other books -- explores the dated expressions that linger in our language in I Love It When You Talk Retro: Hoochie Coochie, Double Whammy, Drop a Dime, and the Forgotten Origins of American Speech (St. Martin's, $25.95).

For example, Obama's "walk and chew gum" remark was a less-vulgar version of what then-President Lyndon B. Johnson once said about then-Rep. Gerald Ford: "He couldn't fart and chew gum at the same time." (The Washington press laundered it to walk, Keyes says.)

Keyes doesn't say whether Johnson originated the expression (my guess is he didn't), but if nothing else, he popularized it to the point where another president could say it more than 40 years later and be understood.

In that sense, "walk and chew gum" is considerably better than a lot of retroterms, which are so thoroughly wedded to bygone eras that they are all but meaningless.

Exhibit A: Camelot to refer to the Kennedy era. Some unwritten law in American journalism says you can't refer to that administration without invoking a 1960 musical about a magical time that history has shown Kennedy fell considerably short of matching. That makes Camelot a retroterm, a cliche and a distortion, for a trifecta of bad writing.

"Basket case" is also a cliche and to young ears less colorful than "zombie bank" for describing an all-but-dead financial institution. But that's the thing about retroterms: They're so far removed from their origin, we've forgotten what inspired them.

During World War I, "basket cases" were legless and armless soldiers who had to be carried off in litters or baskets, Keyes says. I find that far more horrifying than the notion of zombies.

The stimulus bill has been derided for high pork content, so no wonder it's prompting writers to use an early 20th-century saying: "If you like laws and sausage, you should never watch either one being made."

Even earmark, the trendier term for deficit-raising excess, pays homage to pigs, Keyes notes. American settlers nicked patterns into the ears of their wandering swine to prove ownership. It has since come to mean singling out something for special treatment.

Everyone wants to bring back the good old days of economic prosperity. What Keyes' book shows is that, at least in terms of language, they never really left.