Reviews
Publishers Weekly
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” and “cut to the chase.” Keyes (The Quote Verifier) 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). Some pop permutations percolated over decades: Radio’s Take It or Leave It spawned a catch phrase so popular the program was retitled The $64 Question and later returned as TV’s The $64,000 Question. Keyes’s own book Is There Life After High School? became both a Broadway musical and a catch phrase. Some entries are self-evident or have speculative origins, but Keyes’s nonacademic style and probing research make this both an entertaining read and a valuable reference work.
Booklist
In his excellent introduction to this language book, Keyes defines retrotalk as a “slippery slope of puzzling allusions to past phenomena,” allusions that employ terms he refers to as “verbal artifacts,” or phrases that hang around in our national conversation long after the topic they refer to has vanished from memory. Hard as it may be for those of a certain age to acknowledge, young people no longer understand references to 45 rpms, breadboxes, and Ma Bell. In addition, one’s comparisons also often fall along generational lines, as talking-head David Brooks discovered when he compared Hillary Clinton’s first debate performance to Emily Post and her second to Howard Beale. The names of the mistress of etiquette and the raving anchorman from the movie Network do not resonate with anyone younger than 50. The bulk of Keyes’ book is devoted to a pedestrian listing of such words and phrases and their origins, grouped in chapters related to the venues, such as boxing, politicians, movies, and comics, that gave rise to the terms. Still, the list makes addictive reading for word nerds and informative browsing for everyone else.
Library Journal
Keyes (The Quote Verifier: Who Said What, Where, and When) distinguishes this work from other slang and idiom resources by explaining retro terms, that is, words and phrases that have been used for so long that people repeat them without knowing their origin or understanding their precise meaning. Examples include tabloid, initially a compressed medical pill, which became an adjective referring to smaller versions of other things like newspapers. Dubbing these terms retrotalk, Keyes also offers examples of later usage of the phrases in the media and other sources. For example, he quotes Katie Couric saying "Cha-ching" during her news broadcast; younger people likely know that the phrase refers to money but not that the phrase was inspired by a bell on a cash register's drawer. Avoiding a dictionary format, Keyes weaves humor-laced narratives into 22 topical chapters. The index and lengthy notes and bibliography section that support the work are useful but do not document every supporting quotation, like Couric's. With a special focus and light tone, this resource is recommended for large public libraries. - Marianne Orme
Yellow Springs News (OH)
Ralph Keyes is known as a writer’s writer. He earned that distinction by writing well on a variety of topics over a long period of time, sometimes directly for writers, and other times on the origins of modern American expression. His list of over a dozen books includes such titles as The Writer’s Book of Hope: Getting From Frustration to Publication (Owl Books, 2003), The Courage to Write: How Writers Transcend Fear (Henry Holt, 1995), The Quote Verifier: Who Said What, Where, and When (St. Martin’s 2005), “Nice Guys Finish Seventh”: False Phrases, Spurious Sayings, and Familiar Misquotations (Harper Collins, 1992) and his latest, I Love It When You Talk Retro: Hoochie Coochie, Double Whammy, Drop a Dime, and the Forgotten Origins of American Speech, published this week by St. Martin’s Press.
The kind of writing Keyes does requires a great deal of research. Go down into the basement of his house, as I did a few years ago and you will find rows of four drawer filing cabinets stacked double high. It is from these files that he gets the ideas for his books. He gathers and stores newspaper and magazine articles and other bits of information, often his own jottings, as he comes upon them and stashes them away for possible later use. While searching his files for a work in progress, he may very well come upon the seed of an idea for his next book or article. These days, he may just be his own best resource.
And that brings me back to my original point: Keyes is more than a writer; he has fashioned himself into an expert on the origins of expressions used in everyday American speech and as a resource for us all. I Love It When You Talk Retro is a resource work, complete with notes, bibliography and an index, that can be breezed through with the ease of reading a personal essay or a work of fiction. What he has discovered is that the origins of our everyday speech can be a source of amusement, and he readily shares the amusing tidbits he has uncovered with his readers.
“After chasing down their origins I found myself repeatedly musing, ‘So that’s where that comes from!’ Keyes writes.
In I Love It When You Talk Retro Keyes posits that expressions that enrich our language such as “bigger than a breadbox,” “show me the money” and “cut and run,” while seeming to have achieved universal meaning over time, may not really be understood by those of generations that follow the one that spawned them, or by those for whom English is a second language. He calls these words and phrases retrotalk.
“To qualify as a retroterm,” he writes, “a word or phrase must be in current use yet have an origin that isn’t current.”
Catch phrase references like “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up!” “Where’s the beef?” and “cha-ching” of TV commercial fame already a generation old, are not likely to be understood by today’s teens. Neither are references to scratched or broken records likely to conjure up meaningful images to young people who download their music from computers directly to their I-pods. This is the kind of stuff that is fodder for Keyes who tirelessly back-tracks to the point of origin, because some of those we think we know, we do not. The term “wimp,” for instance comes from the Popeye comic strip; a “lame duck” was an eighteenth-century stock trader who didn’t pay his debts; to get “caught in a wringer” refers to a feature of an old fashioned washing machine.
“They are verbal fossils, ones that outlive the organism that made their impression in the first place,” Keyes writes. “This 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.”
“Close, but no cigar!” “not worth a tinker’s damn,” “kick over the traces,” you think you know them? You might want to look them up in I Love It When You Talk Retro. Or you might just want to go from cover to cover. It’s more than just an interesting read; it’s a journey into the past. - Virgil Hervey
National Post (Canada) April 4, 2009
Our everyday speech is filled with arcane references we don’t even know we’re making, terms Ralph Keyes calls verbal fossils. Examples include “cooties” (a term for body lice that afflicted First World War soldiers while fighting in the trenches), “reading between the lines” (derived from people writing secret messages in invisible ink between the lines of a letter in precryptographical times) and “old fogey” (originally referred to the payment received by 18th century soldiers who did extended time in the army). The number of phrases derived from a single puppet show is particularly noteworthy. The classic British entertainment Punch and Judy showcased a stick-wielding husband who would beat down anyone who stood in his way. Keyes writes, “Because so much of its action derived from Punch’s slapping one and all with his stick, the term slapstick became synonymous with broad physical comedy. Pleased as Punch refers to anyone who seems happy with his own actions.”
Hartford Courant June 20, 2009
Gen X'ers with iPod buds stuck into their ears might puzzle over the meaning of terms derived from phonograph records: "flip side," "like a broken record" and "in the groove." Ralph Keyes is here to help with "I Love It When You Talk Retro" (St.
Martin's, $25.95), which describes the origins of terms based on the technology, politics or culture of days gone by.
I never knew, for instance, that "doofus" is derived from "Dufus," a dimwitted character in the Popeye comic strip, or that the first "truth squad" was a group of Republicans who followed President Harry Truman as he campaigned for Adlai Stevenson in 1952. - Rob Kyff
St. Petersburg Times, November 1, 2009
I Love It When You Talk Retro (St. Martin's) by Ralph Keyes explains the origins of colorful phrases for which younger people may have no cultural context, like saying someone sounds like a broken record or an object is bigger than a breadbox.
Philadelphia Inquirer January 17, 2010
As for gung-ho, Ralph Keyes points out in his new I Love It When You Talk Retro that it was the motto of a New Zealand group, taken from the Chinese words kung and ho - work and together. A colonel in the South Pacific adopted it for his Marine battalion, and a 1943 movie made that battalion's story popular - and also the phrase. "Over the years," Keyes writes, "gung-ho took on an odor of overzealousness. Nowadays, calling someone 'real gung-ho' isn't necessarily a compliment."
Times change, meanings too. Keyes' book is full of phrases, most still in use, whose origins are not what we might think, and some really take the cake - a phrase originally used after the Civil War by freed slaves to refer to the cake they'd give the winner of a dance competition that mocked the marches in plantation balls.
- Howard Shapiro
Bufflalo News February 7, 2010
From pink slips to red tape, from asking “Where’s the beef?” to looking a gift horse in the mouth, American English has thousands of interesting colloquialisms. Benchmarks are still vital today, but who remembers that they were once small metal markers placed in the ground by surveyors?
Ralph Keyes does. The author of three books about writing, Keyes takes on the slang of the past century and beyond in his fascinating if overnamed book, “I Love It When You Talk Retro: Hoochie Coochie, Double Whammy, Drop a Dime and the Forgotten Origins of American Speech.”
“Today’s 18-year-old may not know who Mrs. Robinson is, the size of a breadbox or why ‘going postal’ refers to a major uproar,” says the back-cover blurb. Fair enough. But the book is anything but archaic. There’s plenty of relatively recent pop culture—from “You talkin’ to me?” to “I’ll have what she’s having.”
http://www.reginasbooksforallages.info/2010/04/i-love-it-when-you-talk-retro-by-ralph-keyes.html
REGINA'S BOOKS FOR ALL AGES Regina Sunderland's book reviews, book announcements, book introductions and book discussion club. It's all about books!
April 19, 2010
Buzz up! What a find at my local Library. I am one of those goofy people who simply love to use retro phrases and enjoy discovering where they come from.
I Love It When You Talk Retro: Hoochie Coochie, Double Whammy, Drop a Dime, and the Forgotten Origins of American Speech, is the perfect book to read for someone like me. Not only does he cover many different retro phrases, but also explains where they originally came from.
The language is easy to understand, and some of them will have you chuckle. Who can't use a good laugh?
For example, do you know where the phrase - scrape the bottom of the barrel - originates from?
On Page 133 in "I love it when you talk retro!" he explains it as such:
Direct quote : On the eve of the Civil War, pork was second only to wheat as Americans' most popular foodstuff. Southerners were especially partial to this meat: freshly slaugthered or as salt park, fatback, cracklings, chitterlings (chitlins), pickled pig's feet, headcheese, bacon, or ham. Such delectables were liable to be served three times a day. Noting the many form in which Americans ate the flesh of hogs (large pigs), an antebellum doctor in Georgia thought our country should change its name to the Great Hog-Eating Confederacy, or perhaps the Republic of Porkdom.
Pork was typically stored in a barrel. The fuller the barrel, the richer its owner. Poor folks sometimes had to scrape the bottom of the barrel. End Quote.
He continues on explaining about other Pork related terminologies like "bringing home the bacon", "barrel politics", "lard it up" and more.
Do you know where "cut the mustard" comes from?
How about "dark horse"?
271 Pages full of delightful and interesting Notes and information await you in the wonderful book! For word lovers and phrase crazies like me, this book is a great find.
I would rate it an easy 5 Star and think it would make a great present for most. You may want to see if you can find it at your local library or order your copy here:
http://thelandofcurlyhair.blogspot.com/2010/03/books-i-finished-march-2010.html
THE LAND OF CURLY HAIR March 31, 2010
BOOKS I FINISHED - MARCH 2010
This was another totally random selection off an endcap at the library. I read it in little snippets over the month. Loved it! I'll probably buy a copy for our family, as I think it's an excellent way to chalk up some time for English and History credit.
http://littleshopofstories.blogspot.com/2010/03/i-love-it-when-you-talk-retro.html
LITTLE BLOG OF STORIES March 13, 2010
Ah, the title says it all! I Love It When You Talk Retro, by Ralph Keyes, is a wonderful peek into the lost origins of some of America's most beloved and obscure words and phrases. Did you know that the word 'doofus' came from Popeye the comic strip? Didn't think so! I'd like to think that I have a pretty unique vocabulary but this book proved to me that every one of my quirky phrases has a even quirkier beginning. I was fascinated with the facts that Mr.Keyes provides and I'm now over flowing with trivia that I'm sure will help me at the next party I attend. Available in paper back and the fact that it's a fast read makes I Love It When You Talk Retro not only good for your brain but good for your wallet too.
I know you wanna become a cool cat like me! Be sure to check out I Love It When You Talk Retro next time you're in the shop.
- Sydney
http://melindajoy.blogspot.com/2010/03/i-love-it-when-you-talk-retro-book.html
MELINDA JOY: Living, Laughing, Loving March 12, 2010
When I first saw this book advertised in the Philadelphia Inquirer, I knew it was something I needed to add to my collection. I work with many ‘senior’ individuals, and they often throw out phrases that I have no clue what they mean. Have you ever been there? Someone will say something, you have no clue what it means, but you would feel stupid if you asked for clarity, so you just act as if you know what's going on. This book is awesome! It is completely devoted to origins of retroterms, verbal artifacts that hang around in our national conversation long after the topic they refer to has galloped into the sunset. The author states, “To qualify as a retroterm, a word or phrase must be in current use yet have an origin that isn’t current.” The book consists of 22 chapters of true bliss, ranging from Story Lines, Movie Metaphors and The Future of Retrotalk. I have learned so much from this book and I cannot wait to flaunt my newfound knowledge. The first retroterm that caught my eye was white elephant. I am sure many of my readers have been to holiday parties that have had white elephant exchanges. I have always taken part in them and found them to be very entertaining; however, I never thought about where the term came from. Why a white elephant? Well, according to page 12 of I Love It When You Talk Retro, “By legend, when a king in ancient Siam (not Thailand) wanted to make life difficult for someone, he gave that person an albino elephant. Because Buddha’s spirit was thought to inhabit these rare pachyderms, the recipient could not make it a beast of burden. Nor could he sell this elephant. Instead, its new owner had to feed and house this huge white pet until he went broke. From this heritage grows our modern notion of the white elephant: any possession that’s hard to dispose of, but too valued to dispense with.” Interesting fact I must say so myself. At my last white elephant exchange, I got a bag full of “Our 1st Christmas” ornaments from years back. I guess I would much rather this than a literal elephant. In short, I really enjoyed this book. Ralph Keyes has done a great job answering the question, “Where did that phrase come from?” In addition, key words and phrases are highlighted, making this an easy read. I would highly recommend this book without reservation.
http://74.125.47.132/search?q=cache:iSKr5145HjUJ:www.gentrends.com/gentrends_2009/may2009gentrends.pdf+%22you+talk+retro%22&cd=62&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us
GenTrends May 2009
To Ponder. . .
Back in woodshed times, American boys itching for a fight sometimes announced this fact by placing a chip on their shoulder,then daring someone to knock it off. Although fastidious contemporary ears like to think this was a sliver of wood, the chip in question
was more likely to be dried cow dung. Hard as it is to picture any boy putting a piece of excrement on the shoulder of his Abercrombie & Fitch shirt, having a chip on your shoulder still suggests touchy belligerence.
Carnivals and circuses alike featured secondary events off to one side, usually in tents. At these sideshows one might find patent medicine being hawked, or bearded ladies to gawk at, or—most exciting of all—cooch dancers, undulating women in filmy harem outfits whom we acknowledge when using the term hoochie coochie for a wide range of risqué
activity. Although what went on at sideshows was sometimes more exciting than what took place at the main event, today, sideshow suggests an activity of lesser magnitude.
Ralph Keyes writing in …I Love It When You Talk Retro.
To Read. . .
This delightful little compendium is the perfect read for all of us who
tend to say “I remember when” too much. Filled with close to a thou-
sand “retro terms,” this is a handy book to help settle disputes or sim-
ply relieve your curiosity about where “that” term came from.
Don’t be a doofus. Buy this book.I Love It When You Talk Retro:
Hoochie Coochie, Double
Whammy, Drop a Dime and the
Forgotten Origins of American
Speech. Ralph Keyes.
- Robert W. Wendover
http://blogs.thepublicopinion.com/mousepotato/?p=956
MOUSE POTATO
Book Review – “I Love It When You Talk Retro,” June 1, 2009
By J.A. O’Sullivan
The cover says it all: hoochie coochie, double whammy, drop a dime. “I Love It When You Talk Retro,” a new book by Ralph Keyes, explores the history of America’s slang, sayings and street talk. Written crisply and divided into chapters like “Fighting Words, “Movie Metaphors and “Seen in the Funny Papers” Keyes gives the low-down behind the expressions we use, and take for granted, every day.
Each chapter spouts phrases like an overloaded jack-in-the-box, with item bolded so the reader doesn’t miss anything. Take this passage on boxing lingo: “Early boxing matches tended to be rough-and-tumble, knock-down, drag-out affairs that went on until one contestant was knocked unconscious and dragged out of the ring. There were no limits on the types of punches that could be thrown by bare-knuckle prize-fighters (so called because they fought for prizes at fairs and such). These contests were free-for-alls.”
Read straight through, skip around or search the retro-term index at the end of the book to find specific references. A quick flip yields a garden variety of Americana: widgets, red tape, barnstorming, by-the-numbers and black sheep,
You’re bound to know a lot of these gems. You may even know their history. But at 320 pages, you’ll find some interesting trivia and maybe even stumble on your new-old favorite word.
http://www.spada.co.uk/its-retro-but-what-does-it-mean/
SWORDPLAY
News, views and insight for the professional and corporate community
It’s Retro - But What Does It Mean? June 3, 2009
Many of us in the professional sector will today bemoan the deadlines that govern our every move. Whether we’re working in marketing, legal services, PR or even good old journalism, it’s as likely as not that we’re on deadline - and that we’re probably a little stressed in the process of hitting whatever deadline we’ve been given.
But how many of us know where the term “deadline” comes from?
To find out, spare a few minutes - if you can - and consult I Love It When You Talk Retro by Ralph Keyes, an analysis of all kinds of “retroterms” that survive, unexplained, in the English language. The book explains the origin of muckraking, scoop, cut and run and - one for the MPs - show me the money, among a myriad of other terms.
It transpires that a deadline would be delineated in American prisons. “Any prisoner crossing it was liable to be shot”, writes Keyes.
http://www.kpl.gov/blog/?id=20972
KALAMAZOO PUBLIC LIBRARY
Staff Picks: Books, June 18, 2009
I Love It When You Talk Retro
Retrotalk and retroterms. These words are used by Ralph Keyes to describe the subject of his 2009 book I Love It When You Talk Retro. The main point of this volume is to give histories of words and phrases, the full meaning of which cannot be grasped unless one understands their origins. Keyes gives example after example, such as Ma Bell as the nickname for the phone company. We still say we answer the phone’s ring, we dial a number, and then hang up when we are finished with the call, even though with modern phones we have actually done none of these things. There’s a section on phrases that have appeared because of their connection to the office environment, such as rubber stamp, red tape, and pink slip. Animals are also a source for language such as a lame duck, a sitting duck, and a dead duck, as well as the goose that laid the golden egg, pecking order, and putting on the dog. For a time of amusement and enlightenment, this one’s a winner.
Book
David D.
http://www.phillyburbs.com/information/guides/shopping_and_gift/shopping_and_gift_details/article/246/2009/june/30/this-book-is-the-bees-knees-i-have-no-idea-what-that-means.html
PHILLYBURBS.COM
This book is the bee's knees. I have no idea what that means, June 30, 2009
I have a love/hate relationship with expressions and phrases. I use them constantly; hair of the dog, hold your horses, juggernaut and selling like hotcakes. That last expression is actually one of the reasons I also hate certain expressions. When the hell did hotcakes become such a hot seller??
I think my hatred stems from the fact that I don't really know how they started and what the real meaning is behind most common phrases. Then I found this book.
I Love It When You Talk Retro: Hoochie Coochie, Double Whammy, Drop a Dime, and the Forgotten Origins of American Speech
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 and cut to the chase. Keyes (The QuoteVerifier) 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). Some pop permutations percolated over decades: Radio's Take It or Leave It spawned a catch phrase so popular the program was retitled The $64 Question and later returned as TV's The $64,000 Question. Keyes's own book Is There Life After High School? became both a Broadway musical and a catch phrase. Some entries are self-evident or have speculative origins, but Keyes's nonacademic style and probing research make this both an entertaining read and a valuable reference work.
The book is a real humdinger! Damn it. Hang on while I look that up.
posted by Chris Illuminati
arch thinking - http://archthinking.blogspot.com/
ARCH THINKING: A repository of my thoughts about books, art, and architecture
Review: I Love It When You Talk Retro July 2, 2009
Do you know what a Venn diagram is? It's the kind of diagram with two or more circles, showing overlap between different groups. If you were to draw one with pop culture history books (like Don't Know Much About History) in one circle and pop culture books about language (something along the lines of The Mother Tongue) in the other, right smack in the middle of the diagram would be I Love It When You Talk Retro by Ralph Keyes.
In this well-researched, well written book, Keyes examines (mostly) common phrases and words with (sometimes) forgotten origins. According to Keyes, retroterms are "verbal artifacts that hang around in our national conversation long after the topic they refer to has galloped into the sunset... To qualify as a retroterm, a word or phrase must be in current use it yet have an origin that isn't current."
I would argue that many of the words he writes about aren't as mysterious as he makes them out to be - most anyone who took a college lit class is going to know who Lolita is and what that term refers to. But early on in the book, Keyes makes the point that just because a term is familiar to one reader, another may have no idea what it means. For his example, he tells the story of George W. Bush's White House press secretary, Dana Perino, confessing that she didn't really know what the Cuban missile crisis referred to. Once I got over my shock that such a presumably well-educated woman wouldn't know her American political history very well, I took Keyes point, and tried to go with it, so to speak. (Still, I wish Keyes had included an explanation somewhere along the line of how he chose what words to include. I also speculated whether he is holding some back for a sequel.)
For each word or phrase, the author shares the term's meaning, its origin, and an example of its use. One of the more delightful things about reading this book now, is how recent many of these examples were. The 2008 Democratic primary of Clinton v. Obama is referenced several times, as are recent books and articles. While it does make me curious about how well this book will age, it serves to make I Love It When You Talk Retro an excellent read for this day and age.
While I read this book (which I checked out of my local library - the cover really grabbed me) cover to cover, I think most readers would prefer it as a browsing kind of book. Based on the number of times I found my husband reading it in 5-minute snatches, I think he would agree. The kind of history readers who prefer 900-page volumes on intricate scholarship will probably find this book too elementary, but more casual American history fans, and those with an interest in language, will get a real kick out of I Love It When You Talk Retro.
Posted by Lorin (Arch)
http://leeaulson.blogspot.com/2009/07/dig.html
LEE AULSON’S BLOG
Nerd Chic: July 3, 2009
I came for a certain book and left with this one. The cover was unattractively Lichensteinian but I didn't judge. It's basically a collection of western idiomatic language that dates back to ancient times to the present. Written by Ralph Keyes, who has written 15 books before, "I LOVE IT WHEN YOU TALK RETRO," has made the book as a tool for talking like a stuck up cool cat or a tool for decoding your stuck up cool cat friends or even your political science professor that says to his class, "You guys know what I'm talking about." This is a great informative read, it's not just a dog and pony read but a three ringed circus of a read!! Dog and pony refers to circus shows that could only afford modest animals(no tigers and elephants)."-Ralph Keyes
http://www.joetaxpayer.com/archives/1596
JOE TAXPAYER: Financial Commentary for the Average Joe
I Love It When You Talk Retro July 14, 2009
Not long ago, I used the expression “sounds like a broken record” regarding a classmate of my 10 yr old. He had been repeating the same issue over and over in class, and that simile seemed accurate. But my daughter, never having seen a record asked what that expression even meant. Hmmm.
I call a business associate and her voice mail greeting suggests that to have the call transferred, I can “dial zero” to get the operator, but to my younger coworkers, who may have never seen a rotary phone, what does ‘dial’ even mean?
Two years or so ago, when the higher definition DVDs were either HD or BlueRay, I remarked that this reminded me of the Beta/VHS war. That sure did separate those of us over 30 or so from those younger.
On the subject of video tape, I bought my first VCR in 1981, so I was used to saying “tape a show” to mean I was recording it. But for the last few years, it’s a DVR (a TiVo digital video recorder) and there is no tape involved.
I can list a great number of these, expressions that came into the language, and some which are slipping away. So when I heard Brooke Gladstone (Host of On The Media) interviewed the author of I Love It When You Talk Retro, Ralph Keys, I knew this was a book I had to pick up.
Retro offers us not only the examples that I mention above, but goes further back in time to offer the origins of a wealth of expression that we use, or often hear, but may not know where or how they came to be. I knew the current use of the expression “Drink the Kool-Aid” (a phrase meaning blind allegiance), but I hadn’t known that the drink in Jonestown wasn’t Kool-Aid, but Flavor Aid, a knockoff beverage. Keyes offers chapter by chapter, retroterms from law enforcement, movies, politics, and many other areas of life. Toward the end of the book, you realize there are so many expressions, that one book just scratches the surface, a comprehensive discussion would take an encyclopedia (uh, wikipedia for you under 30 readers) to organize.
I often find myself offering up a word or phrase origin when the conversation permits. For example, we all know what paparazzi are, but did you know that the term came from the 1960 film La Dolce Vita by Frederico Fellini? In that film appears a news photographer named Paparazzo, and thus the word made it into the language. (This is my own offering here, it did not make its way into the book.) If you have any interest in “the forgotten origins of American speech” this is a book worth reserving at your library.
Joe
http://blogs.kcls.org/librarytalk/2009/07/i-love-it-when-you-talk-retro.html
King County Library System (Washington)
LIBRARY TALK
I Love it When You Talk Retro by Ralph Keyes, July 14, 2009
I am having a hard time deciding what to call, I Love it When You Talk Retro-- it's American history, its etymology, its social studies, and it is a dictionary! You can start at the beginning and read right through or you can dip in and out of the pages. Now you are wondering what is the book about? It's about the American language, specifically -- "verbal artifacts that hang around in our national conversation long after the topic they refer to has galloped into the sunset", or "a word or phrase that must be in current use yet have an origin that isn't current." To list a few retro terms: hit the sack; skosh; stump speech; Home James and don't spare the horses; cut and run; taken aback; start from scratch; pleased as Punch--how many do you know and use and how many do you know where or when they began? I Love It When You Talk Retro explains the start of these colorful terms. It is a fun read, I frequently have entertained the people around me when I say "oh that's why we say that", and then of course, I read the passage to them.
Author Ralph Keyes explains why some words "strike a chord" and stay with us, while other popular at the time sayings just disappear. Retro talk can be punch lines of jokes, advertising slogans, lines from movies, TV shows and radio and even a person's name. It can be a quote from someone famous, mmmm I not famous but I wonder if I can come up with a phrase that will resonate with people and become a part of the American Language--I'll put "my nose to the grindstone." And "that's all she wrote."
Posted by Michele @ North Bend
http://rocketmanreads.blogspot.com/2009/07/i-love-it-when-you-talk-retro-by-ralph.html
ROCKET MAN READS July 20, 2009
I Love It When You Talk Retro by Ralph Keyes
This book is definitely best when browsed or kept in the bathroom, but as it was I got it from the Leisure section of Parks Library, thus 4 weeks only with no renewals. Quite a fun book, it gives the pop(?) culture origins of all sorts of phrases, both for fun and to help those of us who weren't quite born when, say, people were keeping meats cooled in the icebox (turns out that's the equivalent of a refrigerator, not a freezer). Although there is an exhaustive list of word phrases, I often thought of ones that didn't show up in the index. More frustrating, Keyes often threw out references in the middle of the text that were prime candidates for the book but weren't actually included.
Again, great book, best if you can enjoy it in small chunks.
http://www.madisonpubliclibrary.org/madreads/index.php/2009/07/30/using-the-veg-o-matic-while-listening-to-my-victrola/
MADreads Book News and Reviews from Madison Public Library
Using the Veg-O-Matic while listening to my victrola July 30th, 2009
My mother had a saying: “That and fifty cents will get you right on the bus.” The meaning was, no matter what, you still have to pay for the bus.
An example: Me: “That woman has beautiful hair.”
My Mother: “Yeah–that and fifty cents will get her right on the bus.”
We all make references depending on the times/places we’re from. Depending on our differences, this could mean we’re not always understood. Every year, Beloit College releases its Mindset List, which provides a look at the cultural benchmarks shaping the lives of students entering college that year. The list reminds us of the ever changing frame of reference of popular culture.
Ralph Keyes acknowledges the confusion and makes entertaining sense of it in: I Love It When You Talk Retro: Hoochie Coochie, Double Whammy, Drop a dime, and the Forgotten Origins of American Speech. Divided into subjects, Keyes takes us back down a familiar, nostalgic road, as he defines “retroterms,” (a word or phrase in current use yet having an origin that isn’t current). Ever wonder where “bigger than a breadbox?” came from? Or, what the news anchor meant when she reported the president had “some splainin’ to do?”
This is a book about language but definitely not just for word junkies. It’s geared to those of us old enough to be somewhat familiar with these terms or who use them without knowing their origin—an example for me would be “She’s got moxie.” The book can be read cover to cover but makes an enjoyable browse as well. I liked perusing the “Index of Retroterms” in the back, traveling to corresponding pages when a phrase intrigued me.
I had different levels of knowledge concerning the retroterms. Even when I knew them, however, it was comforting to delve deeper. Barney Fife?” Easy. “Catch-22? I’m on it. “Age of Aquarius?” Honey, I was there. Blanche DuBois? Bobby-Soxers? “I’ll Have What She’s Having?” Check, check and check. On the other hand, why someone would “take the cake?” was news to me.
The book was reassuring as well as enlightening. It certainly made me feel better. Seems that simply by hanging around all these years, I’ve gotten smarter. It’s nice to know I’m really good at something, even if that something is a passing knowledge of outdated terms.
And where will all this accrued knowledge get me? These days, along with 2 bucks–right on the bus.
- Terry, Central
http://mlcref.blogspot.com/2009/08/word-up.html
Mississippi Library Commission Reference Blog
August 2009
We post the interesting and kooky things we find while looking for the answers to reference questions.
I was especially tickled by the entry on mattresses in the furniture section of I Love it When You Talk Retro. It seems that before the insides of mattresses were monitored by any sort of law, many new owners would wake up itching. I suppose that this is why the phrase “Don’t let the bedbug bite” first appeared. States started to require that a list of mattress contents be attached to new mattresses. This solved the original problem and opened a whole new can of bedbugs. It seems that the warnings against removing the content labels were so dire that the mattress-buying public was afraid to do so. A whole generation of mattress label hilarity was born.
http://marcdecoster.blogspot.com/2009/08/retrotalk.html
Weblog van Marc De Coster August 2009
Does anyone know the meaning of "ping-pong diplomacy" or the origin of the "Stockholm syndrome"? In case many of the history lessons from high school have been erased from your hard drive, fear not: you don't have to go back to school. There are good books for refreshing your memory. Every American that would like to fart every once in a while in an intellectual conversation now can read the wonderful book ‘I love it when you talk retro.'
Europeans with an advanced knowledge of English can also enjoy it. Retro terms are many anticipated words and expressions whose origin is often forgotten. These terms remain in the collective memory but few people know where they came from. They are verbal fossils that sit anchored in (American)-English conversation. For some readers (for whom English is their native language) the author gives perhaps a little too much elementary knowledge.
A handful of examples: pink elephant; Casanova; bimbo; Jack the Ripper, man-bites-dog, tabloid, gonzo journalism, Stepford Wives, Dr. Strangelove, Rambo, Kodak moments, 64000 dollar question (here, the ham question), butterfly effect.
This is no bite-catch-finished book. Nor is it a glance at fashionable words. Much of what's understood is also known by us. Author Ralph Keyes takes us on an intriguing and enlightening journey through the phenomenon called "retrotalk." Recommended for word freaks.
TRANSLATED FROM THE DUTCH BY JANE BAKER
http://daily-mortgagerates.blogspot.com/2009/11/review-of-i-love-it-when-you-talk-retro.html dl 11 6 09
DAILY MORTGAGE RATES November 5, 2009
Review of I Love It When You Talk Retro: Hoochie Coochie, Double Whammy, Drop a Dime, and the Forgotten Origins of American Speech (Hardcover)
When our daughter-in-law's parents turned 60 last December, my husband and I sent them a box of memorabilia from our common youth containing a "Don't Trust Anyone over 30" button, a "Make Love Not War" mug (with peace symbol), a "Groovy Chick" T-shirt, the Sunset Book of Macrame Plant Hangers, and our personal fave, a barbecue apron that read "I owned an 8-track player."This was all opened in front of the kids who were visiting for Christmas.The parents howled.The kids were...baffled.
Better that we had sent them Ralph Keyes "I Love It when You Talk Retro."Not just for serious Wordies, this collection of "retro terms" (which Keyes defines as a word or phrase...in current use yet [has]an origin that isn't current") is an equally fun read for your favorite boomer, clueless teenager, or simply the idle curious.It works well as a coffee table reference (we regularly find guests leafing through it) or nightstand favorite; our copy, in fact, has been regularly commuting back and forth between both places.
"I Love It When You Talk Retro" is a wonderful addition to anyone's personal library.
http://www.largeheartedboy.com/blog/archive/2010/02/largehearted_wo_2.html
LARGEHEARTED BOY February 10, 2010
This is the sort of book that either makes you really fun or really boring at parties, depending on what sort of parties you go to.
Amazon Customer Reviews
5.0 stars So Interesting!
Sarah Mallory (Sacramento, CA) (REAL NAME)
loved finding out about the origins of all of these common phrases. Some I had never even heard of, but some I had an idea of where they came from. Quite an interesting read. I am only 23, so while I have heard most of the phrases, finding the origins was quite interesting! My mom is next in line to read it!
5.0 stars Talking "Retro"
Margo Dunlavey "Margo" (Rockville, MD)
This delightful book gives the reader the origins and meanings of a multitude of catch phrases that you have heard, but were perhaps not sure of. It is a quick read. I have bought a copy as a gift for my son, who loves words, but is too young to know many of the phrases.
5.0 stars This is essential reference
Fairlee E. Winfield "Author of BUFFALOed" (Scottsdale, Arizona)
Not only a reference though. It's fun too. For a writer like me, even if you lived the retro talk, you tend to forget. This is great to refresh your memory and grab the feeling of early American speech. Grandma never did learn to say "refrigerator." And gosh darn it, watch that talk about 45's if you want to be cool with the kiddies.
5.0 stars Pass it on...Pass it down...
G. Courter "LastWord" (Florida)
When my father, age 94, hears a phrase like "juggernaut" he shows off with a convoluted--and usually incorrect--story about its origin. Now I have "I Love It When You Talk Retro" to set matters straight. And no, Dad, juggernaut is NOT a German WWI term, Ralph Keyes explains it comes from the Hindu deity Jagannath...see the book for the full explanation and photo. For me "Retro" falls into three categories: a slideshow of my life (Woodstock Nation, Flower Children, Rosebud, Chauncey Gardiner), explanations for things I always hear by never really could define (What the hell is a catbird seat anyway?)and letting the cat out of the bag about knowledge that made me feel superior (Potemkin village, Pangloss, Miss Haversham, and Comstockery.) What's interesting is that the value of this book will expand with time. The further we move away from these origins, the more confused we will become by their lingering references. Cultural literacy demands Retro fluency and this will be the classic reference. Even better: it's a fun read...crispy chips of insights. Bet you can't read just one section at a time. And Dad, Avatar, is also from the Hindu, and has nothing to do with birds and French!
4.0 stars A rather interesting book
By Kurt A. Johnson (Marseilles, Illinois, USA) (TOP 50 REVIEWER)
Quite a few expressions we Americans use are out-of-date expressions that we nonetheless know the meaning of, more or less. But, even among those that we use, we often do not completely understand the roots of the expression. Well, in this rather interesting book, author and wordsmith Ralph Keyes goes through many retro expressions, and tells you exactly what they mean.
I must say that I found this to be a rather interesting book. The author spread a nice, wide net in finding lots of expressions and covering their meanings. Now, as you might expect he could not possibly cover *every* expression out there, so you will no doubt find expressions missing that you would like explained. But, that said, this is a very good book on the subject, one that I am quite glad that I checked out.
5 stars A fun and informative read
By Marty Hollingsworth "grammawalt.com" (CO United States)
This is a fun book for finding out where phrases that you use all the time came from. It'll give you great cocktail party chat. :-)
5 stars This Book is a Grand Slam Home Run
Nancy H. Dickson (Garrett Park, Maryland)
This book--I Love It When You Talk Retro: Hoochie Coochie, Double Whammy, Drop a Dime, and the Forgotten Origins of American Speech--is an absolute hoot for anyone with a fascination for the American Language and/or Popular Culture. For many of us it evokes a rich pre-Internet, pre-Facebook past and for younger readers a view into the lives of their parents and grand-parents. My husband, Paul Dickson, who writes about language, gave this book to me and I couldn't let go of it.
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5 stars Not just for Wordies
P. Offen (San Diego)
When our daughter-in-law's parents turned 60 last December, my husband and I sent them a box of memorabilia from our common youth containing a "Don't Trust Anyone over 30" button, a "Make Love Not War" mug (with peace symbol), a "Groovy Chick" T-shirt, the Sunset Book of Macrame Plant Hangers, and our personal fave, a barbecue apron that read "I owned an 8-track player." This was all opened in front of the kids who were visiting for Christmas. The parents howled. The kids were...baffled.
Better that we had sent them Ralph Keyes "I Love It when You Talk Retro." Not just for serious Wordies, this collection of "retro terms" (which Keyes defines as a word or phrase...in current use yet [has]an origin that isn't current") is an equally fun read for your favorite boomer, clueless teenager, or simply the idle curious. It works well as a coffee table reference (we regularly find guests leafing through it) or nightstand favorite; our copy, in fact, has been regularly commuting back and forth between both places.
"I Love It When You Talk Retro" is a wonderful addition to anyone's personal library.
5 stars An E Ticket Ride!
Gilah Pomeranz (Yellow Springs, OH)
Ralph Keyes has a way of defying classification with his books that are a conglomeration of education, inspiration, and entertainment. In I Love It When You Talk Retro, Keyes is at his best, providing a fresh perspective on old jargon. Whether you're a language lover, a movie buff, a political junkie, a sports fan, or a pop-culture nut (or, like me, an eclectic mix), you'll enjoy picking out the words and phrases--easy to do with the handy index--that you use frequently (with or without knowing their origins) which younger folks may find perplexing.
What I liked best was leafing through and realizing that I use phrases like "glove compartment" and "cut to the chase" without thinking that, taken literally, they don't really make sense to me--until Keyes explains the origins.
In sharing the book with others, we've also enjoyed coming up with retro talk we use that didn't make the book, such as E-Ticket (referring to Disneyland's early designation of their most thrilling rides) and Hollanderizing (which I always thought meant sanitizing, but turns out it refers to a fur-dyeing process).
Moreover, we found retro talk can be local. I refer to our village market as "Luttrell's" (the family who owned it when I was growing up), while my kids call it "Weaver's" (as they knew it in their childhood and teen years). Actually, for the last ten years or so, it's officially "Tom's." But I think "Tom's" won't really be official until it's retro...
Thanks to Ralph Keyes for doing it again: educating, inspiring, and entertaining!
4 Stars More on words from a writer's writer
Virgil Hervey (Ohio)
Ralph Keyes is more than a writer; he has fashioned himself into an expert on the origins of expressions used in everyday American speech. I Love It When You Talk Retro is a resource work, complete with notes, bibliography and an index, that can be breezed through with the ease of reading a personal essay or a work of fiction. What he has discovered is that the origins of our everyday speech can be a source of amusement, and he readily shares the amusing tidbits he has uncovered with his readers.
"After chasing down their origins I found myself repeatedly musing, `So that's where that comes from!' Keyes writes.
In I Love It When You Talk Retro Keyes posits that expressions that enrich our language such as "bigger than a breadbox," "show me the money" and "cut and run," while seeming to have achieved universal meaning over time, may not really be understood by those of generations that follow the one that spawned them, or by those for whom English is a second language. He calls these words and phrases retrotalk.
"To qualify as a retroterm," he writes, "a word or phrase must be in current use yet have an origin that isn't current."
Catch phrase references like "I've fallen and I can't get up!" "Where's the beef?" and "cha-ching" of TV commercial fame already a generation old, are not likely to be understood by today's teens. Neither are references to scratched or broken records likely to conjure up meaningful images to young people who download their music from computers directly to their I-pods. This is the kind of stuff that is fodder for Keyes who tirelessly back-tracks to the point of origin, because some of those we think we know, we do not. The term "wimp," for instance comes from the Popeye comic strip; a "lame duck" was an eighteenth-century stock trader who didn't pay his debts; to get "caught in a wringer" refers to a feature of an old fashioned washing machine.
"They are verbal fossils, ones that outlive the organism that made their impression in the first place," Keyes writes. "This 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."
"Close, but no cigar!" "not worth a tinker's damn," "kick over the traces," you think you know them? You might want to look them up in I Love It When You Talk Retro. Or you might just want to go from cover to cover. It's more than just an interesting read; it's a journey into the past.
4.0 stars Great resource
By Anyechka (Rensselaer, NY United States) (TOP 500 REVIEWER)
I couldn't stop reading this book because it was so packed with wonderful words and expressions, many of which I had never even heard of. As I read the introduction, I couldn't believe that so many young people entering college today have, for example, never heard of Watergate, are unfamiliar with cassette tapes, and draw a blank at the phrase "you sound like a broken record," but then again, a survey a few years back did show that more Americans can identify the Three Stooges than the three branches of our executive government, and sadly many young people believe history is boring and stupid. While many of the retroterms identified and explained by Mr. Keyes were completely new to me, that just proves the point he was making at the beginning. What's baffling or ancient history to your generation is a well-known reference or term used by another. However, because I have read a lot of older books, some of the terms that supposedly are a mystery to my generation were quite familiar, such as davenport (my preferred word for couch, actually!), icebox, victrola, Hays Code, and Comstock Act. Mr. Keyes doesn't just limit his book to 19th and 20th century retrotalk, but goes far back in history in some cases, such as for "cut a Gordian knot," "Pyrrhic victory," and "hanging by a thread." The book is divided into categories such as comic books, literature, university subjects, sports, personal names, transportation, and television. I also found it helpful as a historical fiction writer, as I discovered that some of the phrases and words I've used in my writing hadn't been coined back then! However, I felt that a bit of a closer proofreading/editing job might have been needed, as I discovered a couple of embarrassing errors. For example, "The Little Old Lady from Pasadena" is credited to The Beach Boys instead of Jan and Dean (did The Beach Boys have a less famous version of it or something?), and Wally Cleaver is identified as Beaver Cleaver's father instead of his brother! And even though I share Mr. Keyes's liberal views, I felt it was a bit unprofessional for him to so clearly advertise his stance throughout certain parts of the book. This isn't a political book, even though it does deal with some retrotalk that originated in politics. A good writer isn't supposed to let his or her personal bias show; I know I probably would have thrown the book down in disgust and not finished it had a right-wing writer been airing his own conservative views unnecessarily! Finally, I was turned off by how Boomer-centric much of the book was, particularly because Mr. Keyes says he was born in 1945, which would make him one of the youngest members of the Silent Generation, not a Boomer as he seems to think he is. I rolled my eyes whenever I read something like "Many Boomers have happy memories of..." or "If you ask a Boomer..." Why does this generation always find a way to make every single issue always come back to them and be all about their generation? I'm not a Boomer, but I'm pretty sure that most people in my generation know what a Magic Marker is, for example, and are familiar with tv shows from the Fifties and Sixties that we've seen on Nick at Nite or watched with an older member of the family! I also thought that short schrift was given to more current retrotalk. In spite of the shortcomings, however, I would recommend this book to anyone interested in language and linguistics. It's always fascinating to see how language evolves and develops, and how things which are cutting-edge and familiar in one era are almost obsolete in another.