Gone and Almost Forgotten

It is common knowledge to those who know me that I have substantial frustrations with the way our English language is abused on an ongoing basis. I've been known to rant and rave about trendy (meaningless) expression although I'm sure that in the sixties and seventies I did my share of "far out" and "groovy" and other age-specific expressions.

Lately it occurred to me that we have done away with so many of our descriptive albeit trite expressions that typified the speech of our parents and grandparents. So I thought it might be amusing or didactic to create a nostalgic wandering through the past by way of colorful expressions.

One obvious phenomenon is the prevalent use of animals and insects for emphasis. At any given moment, one may be knee high to a grasshopper, have a bug in his ear, have a bug up his nose (those are two different concepts, traced directly to anatomical parts, I suppose) or be a fly in the ointment. Keeping with the insect theme, one could be mad as a hornet, be a fly on the wall (better than being in the ointment) or, in the best of circumstances, be the bees' knees.

Progressing up the animal chain, we have those who are fine as a frog's hair, madder than a wet hen, happy as a pig in slop, light as a feather (presumably from a bird donor) or drunk as a skunk. Continuing with the animal kingdom, curiosity killed the cat, indifference can be as insignificant as a rat's posterior and all this having transpired since Hector was a pup. You could easily be hungrier than a horse, have a monkey on your back and be more stubborn than a mule, all this occurring on a dog-day afternoon.

And then we proceed to the presumed high end of the food chain, homo sapiens. If we want to present flattery, our speed would be like forty going north and performance to beat the band. Better still, we can be fit as a fiddle so as to rock the boat (in a positive way). In terms of time, events occur once in a blue moon, at which time we can operate on the whole kit and kaboodle (I've never determined what a kaboodle looks or feels like). Another version is the whole nine yards, all of that done with the precision like nobody's business.

We have been equally successful at describing the downside of our lives with colorful expressions. In these cases, we are left holding the bag, potentially flat as a pancake or tighter than a drum. In the view of our opponents, we would be fit to be tied, colder than a witch's breath or white as a sheet. And at the height of insults, we are potentially all bark and no bite, dumb as a rock or ugly as sin - the reality of which combined to cause us to cry like a little girl.

Our language never gets this colorful any more. I suspect that most folks under thirty have never heard most of these expressions and have never mastered the art of metaphor or insect body parts. Without a doubt, these expressions are much more pleasant to my ears than many that I hear from our younger counterparts and more easily understood. Am I suggesting that we resurrect Hector or bees' knees? Probably not. But I reserve the right to use any of these, if only with people old enough not to look at me with curiosity.