Keep Talking

6/24/2015

The Lay of the Land

By Lyn Messersmith

Keep Talking

            A lot of common words and phrases baffle those of us with well-worn faces. Granted, the slang changes quickly. Today’s teens wouldn’t have a clue about “the cat’s meow,” “Kilroy was here,” or “shanks’ mares,” but I can’t help wondering if the electronic generation has ever been exposed to the tried and true sayings that I grew up with. Those shortcuts enabled us to make a point without much explanation.

            If you told your grandkid he was preaching to the choir, would he know what you meant? How about the warning that birds of a feather flock together? Or throwing good money after bad?

Parents of my era used some of those comments as argument stoppers. Try it. Toss out something of that nature and walk out of the room. End of story. I’ll bet it’d work even with the uninitiated; they’d be so busy trying to decipher the code you’d be gone before they got their mouths open to protest. I tried King’s X on my grandkids recently, and got a blank stare until I explained it. And, you know it’s sort of hard to explain—I don’t recall ever having it explained; we just always knew about it.

            My mom took shorthand in high school, and it stuck with her, even though she didn’t ever work as a secretary. Sometimes she used it in letters to former classmates, saying it was good to keep in practice. I figure she just didn’t want nosy little eyes (or my dad’s) in on the conversation if she didn’t get it sealed and sent right away.

These days, we simply lop off the first letter of every word instead of spelling out Environmental Protection Agency, United States Department of Agriculture, or Internal Revenue Service. Put a couple of dozen of those in a news article and the reader is every bit as confused as if it had been written in shorthand. It’s probably done for the same reason Mom had in mind, and with good reason. All of those entities are so scary we’re not supposed to think too deeply about them.

Whenever I hear SODAK I wonder when we added another state, and where it’s located. Somewhere close to WYOBRASKA, wouldn’t you guess?

            Grandma had her own lingo, but it was easily understood from the context. A blouse (top, in today’s jargon) was a “waist.” She commenced to bake a pie, and told me to ride my “wheel” to Mrs. Beals’ to borrow a cup of sugar.

            Our teachers claimed that if we didn’t stop sticking out our tongues and wriggling our ears our faces would freeze that way. We didn’t quite believe them, but did agree that some of our classmates would have been improved if it had happened.

            The English language is a funny thing. It evidently evolves, and not just in the realm of slang or clichés. I was taught that the plural of deer is deer, and a group of buffalo is still buffalo. That’s not how I read and hear it, of late.

Criminals pled guilty in the old days, but now we hear someone pleaded guilty or innocent by reason of insanity. That seems kind of insane to me, but when I hear that someone bleeded to death, I’m going for the straitjacket.

My teachers told us that a hen lays an egg, and you lay something on the table but you don’t lay down on the bed. They said you tell a lie, or lie down. I guess they were right, because my computer objected, just now, to the business of laying down on a bed. Still, I hear teachers and educated commentators use that phrase all the time.

We had to memorize that all men are endowed with certain inalienable rights, but evidently our teachers were wrong. Webster now says the correct word is unalienable. I guess he has an unalienable right to change his mind. Here’s my message to old Noah, and a bunch of careless speakers.  You can lead this old mare to water, but you can’t make her drink.