Press Coverage
In mid-April Editor & Publishers – the leading trade publication for journalists – ran an op-ed about retroterms used by journalists. This ignited a firestorm of response, pro, con, and somewhere in between. Here is the op-ed itself, followed by responses on and offline.
'Retro Talk': Cultural References Mystify Young.Talk of the Nation, NPR, March 10, 2009 [More]
Talk Retro to Me, Baby Los Angeles Times,
March 25, 2009 [More]
Author Digs for Phrases That Linger
Columbus Dispatch, March 29, 2009 [More]
Remembering Our Groovy Heritage of Words
Knoxville News-Sentinel, March 31, 2009 [More]
WOSU Open Line, NPR, April 2, 2009 [More]
Author Strikes Nerve with 'Retro Talk' Herald-Times (Bloomington, IN), April 26, 2009 [More]
What's the Scuttlebutt? ... And Other Slang Terms Decoded New York Post April 12, 2009 [More]
Unusual suspects: When phrases give up the ghost, Boston Globe, May 3, 2009 [More]
Times Literary Supplement, May 8, 2009 [More]
NYT Talks Like Montgomery Burns, Columbia Journalism Review, May 11, 2009 [More]
Why I Write, Publishers Weekly, May 11, 2009 [More]Talking Retro. On the Media, June 5, 2009 [More]
Summer Reading: from OED to OMG, Hartford Courant, June 20, 2009 [More]
Some Terms That Have Outlived Their Roots but Not Their Usefulness, Voice of America, June 18, 2009 [More]
Florida Weekly July 29, 2009
THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE IS A RICH AND COLORFUL thing, full of strange words and unusual phrases.
NANCY STETSON nstetson@floridaweekly.com
"One thing I like about language is the way it reflects our culture, our social history," says writer Ralph Keyes (his last name rhymes with eyes.) "There's just endless variation and I think revelation about ourselves in the way we speak, the words we use."
Mr. Keyes, perhaps best known for his bestseller "Is There Life After High School?" which was made into a Broadway musical, recently released "I Love It When You Talk Retro: Hoochie Coochie, Double Whammy, Drop a Dime, and the Forgotten Origins of American Speech." ($25.95, St. Martin's Press) Retrotalk, or retroterms, he says, are words or phrases that make sense to people of the same era, but may not make sense to younger generations, or to immigrants.
For example, he writes, "Retrotalk is a slippery slope of puzzling allusions to past phenomena. Such allusions take the form of retroterms, verbal artifacts that hang around in our national conversation long after the topic they refer to has galloped into the sunset. They are verbal fossils, ones that outlive the organism that made their impression in the first place. They could be a person, a product, a past bestseller, an old radio or TV show, an athletic contest, a comic strip, an acronym, or an advertisement long forgotten."
Think of it as looking at the generation gap from a different angle. Each new generation has always formed their own slang and catch-phrases, partially in order to differentiate themselves from their elders.
But the older generation's phrases and common terms of reference may be equally indecipherable to those younger.
For example, he says that cultural references such as "you sound like a broken record," "stuck in a groove," "45 rpm" "flip side" and "B-side" might not make any sense to a generation that uses iPods.
They might not know what "bigger than a breadbox" means, or "98-pound weakling," what Watergate was, or why you shouldn't drink the Kool-Aid.
Mr. Keyes's son Scott was born right after the world's worst nuclear power plant disaster occurred in Ukraine.
And when he was in middle school, he went up to his mother and asked, "Mom, who's this Cher Noble I keep hearing about?"
"Isn't that funny?" Mr. Keyes says. "And so understandable.
"I saw a movie once, it might have been 'Raising Arizona.' And this young woman goes into a motel, closes the door. And it's an old motel, and has a rotary phone. She looks at it and scowls, and then she picks up the receiver and starts punching the holes in the dial! It's like, 'Come on, why isn't this working?'
"But think about the terms we still use that are related to actually dialing a rotary phone: dial tone. Dial-up service to get onto the Internet. Dial for dollars. These are all based on an obsolete technology. And that's the esssence of a retroterm."
Some old words are applied to new products, he says. For example, dashboard used to refer to an "angled board used to protect buggy users from the muddy backspash of horses' hooves." Now we use it for the inside panel of a car behind the steering wheel. And Mac computer users know the term as something that shows mini-applications called widgets.
In his book, Mr. Keyes writes that "new circumstances demand new words, however, and Americans have always been up to the task of supplying them. A recurring question in this book is why some endure as retroterms while others don't."
He comes up with a list. Retroterms strike a chord, fill a void, excite strong feeling and are fun to say. "I can't believe I ate the whole thing" didn't last as long as a catch-phrase, but "Where's the beef?" did. Orwellian, he says, is more fun to say than Kiplingesque. And words such as "cootie," "rope-a-dope," "sizzle" and "bimbo" are just fun to say.
But even those of the same generation might not understand all retroterms. In one humorous story in "I Love It When You Talk Retro," Mr. Keyes recounts the story of an older woman who saw the word "Ka-ching!" in a headline. She thought the term came from China, so asked all her Asian friends what it meant, not realizing it was the sound an old manual cash register makes.
Mr. Keyes's favorite phrase is "98- pound weakling."
"I grew up reading comic books with these Charles Atlas ads, where Max, the 98-pound weakling, got sand kicked in his face," he says. (After going through the Charles Atlas plan, Max returns to beat up the bully and win the girl.)
"And I like some of these where I had to learn (their origins)," he says. "For example, scuttlebutt was the water barrel where sailors gathered on ships. The barrel was called the butt, and the hole where you got the water out of was called the scuttle. They would share gossip like people did over watercoolers later on. That was fun to learn."
The book was originally three times the size; Mr. Keyes had to whittle it down to a more manageable length. Still, it's chock full of stories of how certain words and phrases came to be, words such as gizmo, chop chop, cold turkey, blue stocking, mug shot, cut a rug and nudge nudge, wink wink.
In the B's alone it refers to Babbitt, Barney Fife, Big Brother, Blanche DuBois, Bonnie and Clyde, the Boston Strangler, Buck Rogers and Buster Brown.
His fascination with retrotalk, Mr. Keyes says, "is the way that the words and phrases which we use are so indicative of our generation, or what time we grew up in. And I think the catchphrases we rely on are just as ingrained as when we're young as our taste in music, our hairstyle, and the clothes we wear. And that's what I try to talk about in 'I Love It When You Talk Retro.'"
Bark July/August 2009
Wagging the Dog: A few choice phrases and their origins
Raph Keyes
In one of Aesop’s lesser fables an ox approaches a manger to eat some its straw but is driven off by a furious dog who was napping there. Finally the ox wanders away, musing that even though the ill-tempered dog does not intend to eat this straw himself, he is determined that no one else should either. A person like that is now known as a dog in the manger.
Dogs are not only man’s – and woman’s – best friend but a fertile source of expressions firmly rooted in our past. Think of them as retroterms. Most retroterms only make sense when you know where they originated. Many originated with dogs.
In years past, smaller circuses that featured trained dogs and decorated ponies were disparaged as dog and pony shows, ones that could only afford modest-sized animals (no tigers or elephants). This phrase is still used to characterize events with more show than substance. One news commentator called Iran’s conference on Holocaust denial a “dog-and-pony show.”
Or take yellow dog Democrats. Old Yeller notwithstanding, in rural America a yellow dog has never been considered particularly desirable. After the Civil War, unreconstructed Confederates vowed that they would vote for a yaller dog before they’d vote for a Republican. This inspired the term yellow dog Democrat for one who is blindly loyal to that party. Today those willing to work with Republicans call themselves blue dog Democrats.
During the late nineteenth century dog became slang for pretension. Ostentatiously handing someone your business card was a form of dog. So was making sure that others knew your ancestors fought in the Revolution. In time dog fused with putting on airs to become putting on the dog. An 1869 graduate of Yale later wrote about student norms at his alma mater, “To put on dog, is to make a flashy display, to cut a swell.”
In Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1892 story “Silver Blaze,” a murder mystery is solved by Sherlock Holmes’s observation of a “curious incident.” On the night of the murder, a dog in the stable where the body was later found did not bark. This suggested that nothing was amiss until the racehorse this man was trying to maim reared up and killed him. That is the famous case of the dog that didn’t bark. This concept has since become a popular allusion to all sorts of situations in which a revealing element is something that did not happen. Author Bob Woodward called the fact that throughout Richard Nixon’s Watergate tapes neither he nor any aide ever asked what would be the right thing to do the dog that didn’t bark.
One durable canine-based retroexpression was apparently born in the newsroom of the New York Sun during the Gilded Age. “If a dog bites a man, that’s not news,” Sun city editor John Bogart is said to have told a cub reporter who asked for his definition of news. “If a man bites a dog, that’s news.” In general discourse this reporter’s axiom has become shorthand for any extraordinary event at all. An Indianapolis Star article called counterintuitive research findings that show workplace stress is in decline “a man bites dog kind of story.”
Every human group has terms, concepts, and yarns so familiar to insiders that they can be referenced with a single word or phrase. Like the journalist’s definition of news, some involve dogs. Since it was well established in publishing that bookbuyers had an insatiable appetite for books about Abraham Lincoln, medicine, and dogs, an old saw among publishers is that a book titled Lincoln’s Doctor’s Dog would be a surefire bestseller. Over time, in and out of the book business, “Lincoln’s Doctor’s Dog” is used as shorthand for a guaranteed commercial success.
Another crossover retroterm originated in the St. Petersburg lab where Ivan Petrovich Pavlov studied dogs’ salivary glands. The Russian physiologist noticed that his canine subjects began to drool whenever they expected to be fed, whether food was forthcoming or not. In an ingenious set of experiments in the early twentieth century Pavlov engaged a stimulus—blowing a whistle, striking a tuning fork, ringing a bell—every time his dogs were fed. Eventually the animals began to salivate whenever they heard such a sound.. Reference to Pavlov’s dogs evokes images of an automatic response like this, and is often applied to human beings. Those who reach for their BlackBerry at the sound of any beep have been compared to Pavlov’s dogs.
When dealing with English speakers from other countries, retrotalk like this can be risky. Ever since the time six decades ago when Lawry's Prime Rib in Los Angeles began offering patrons paper sacks with which to take leftovers home for their pets the term doggy bag has referred to any container used to transport uneaten food home from a restaurant. In the United States. In England, however, doggy bags are what dog-walkers use to clean up their pets' messes.
Retroterms don’t have to be antique. Some have a fairly recent pedigree. Take Wag the Dog. This 1997 movie featured a U.S. president who hires a political consultant to help him cope with a looming sex scandal. That consultant fakes a war with Albania, complete with phony newscasts. Because this movie was released less than a month before Bill Clinton became embroiled in the Monica Lewinsky affair, any subsequent military action authorized by Clinton was derided by detractors as a wag-the-dog strategy. More broadly wag the dog has come to suggest diversionary tactics of many kinds. In the sense of smaller events controlling larger ones, this catchphrase has been around for centuries. Some believe it originated in an old joke: “Why does a dog wag its tail? Because a dog is smarter than its tail. If the tail was smarter, the tail would wag the dog.”