Heavens to Murgatroyd!

[gauge33]

Would you recognize the word Murgatroyd?  -   Heavens to Murgatroyd!
Lost Words from our childhood:  Words  gone as fast as the buggy whip!  Sad really! 

The  other day, a not so elderly (65) lady said something to her son about driving a Jalopy and he looked at her quizzically and said what the heck is a Jalopy?  OMG  (new  phrase!) -  he had never heard of the word jalopy!!     She knew she was old but not that old.

Well, I hope you are Hunky Dory after you read this and chuckle  - by  Richard Lederer
 
About a month ago, I illuminated some old expressions that have become obsolete because of  the inexorable march of technology.  These phrases included "Don't touch that dial," "Carbon copy," "You sound like a broken record" and  "Hung out to dry."

Back in the olden days we had a lot of moxie.  We'd put on our best bib and tucker to straighten up and fly right -  Heavens to Betsy! 

Gee whillikers!  Jumping Jehoshaphat! Holy moley!  We were in like Flynn and living the life of Riley and even a regular guy couldn't accuse us of being a knucklehead, a nincompoop or a pill. Not for all the tea in China!
 
Back in the olden days, life used to be swell but when's the last time anything was swell?  Swell has gone the way of beehives, pageboys and the D.A, of spats, knickers, fedoras, poodle skirts, saddle shoes and pedal pushers.  Oh, my aching back.  Kilroy was here but he isn't anymore.
 
We wake up from what surely has been just a short nap and before we can say, well I'll be a monkey's uncle!/This is a fine kettle of  fish! - we discover that the words we grew up with, the words that seemed omnipresent as oxygen, have vanished with scarcely a notice from our tongues and our pens and our keyboards.

Poof, go the words of our youth, the words we've left behind.  We blink and they're gone.  Where have all those phrases gone?

Long gone:  Pshaw/The milkman did it/Hey!  It's your nickel.  Don't forget to pull the chain/Knee high to a grasshopper.  Well, Fiddlesticks! Going like sixty.  I'll see you in the funny papers.  Don't take any wooden nickels/Heavens to Murgatroyd!
 
It turns out there are more of these lost words and expressions than Carter has liver  pills.  This can be disturbing stuff!  We of a certain age have been blessed to live in changeful times.  

For a child each new word is like a shiny toy, a toy that has no age.  We at the other end of the chronological arc have the advantage of remembering there are words that once did not exist and there were words that once strutted their hour upon the earthly stage and now are heard no more, except in our collective memory.  It's one of the greatest advantages of aging.
 
See ya later, alligator

[lucitabby]

Yikes.  I know and have said most of these "sayings."

Another one you don't hear anymore is "well, isn't that the bee's knees"

Must stop - too many come to mind

[equalityrocks]

Thank you for this story. Each word holds a special place in my memory.

[i.am.vivian]

When I was a kid it would drive me nuts when my mother would use phrases like "that's putting the cart before the horse" which meant absolutely nothing to me growing up in a large post-war 20th-century city.  She grew up on a turn-of-the-century  farm where there were no automobiles, no refrigerators, no interior plumbing and no central heating.  Talking to her kids like that she may as well have been dispensing her fortune-cookie-style bits of advice in Chinese.  

And if you want to see something swell,   soak a sponge in water!     🙂 

(Back in a while, crocodile)  

[ypdc_dennis]

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@gauge33 wrote:
About a month ago, I illuminated some old expressions that have become obsolete because of  the inexorable march of technology.  These phrases included "Don't touch that dial", "Carbon copy", "You sound like a broken record" and  "Hung out to dry".

---

"Don't touch that dial" -- my microwave uses a dial (and it's not old), the radios all have dials (but one also has auto-seek), but indeed, no TV with a dial.

cc is still in use even if a real carbon copy is now rare.

And I still hang out things to dry.

-..-

[pocomocomputing]

I was reading some installation instructions for a new occupancy detection light/fan wall switch I was installing. It has two small four position tiny dial switches to set the sensitivity of detecting motion and duration for how long the switch stays on. In the instructions, it says to turn the dial switch clockwise or counter-clockwise to increase/decrease the time or sensitivity.

When I read this, I was wondering how many buyers are able to read and understand what clockwise and counter-clockwise means today will digital clocks so prevalent. I know my kids (now in their later 20s) had a hard time understanding analog clocks when young in school especially with the use of fractions to give a time (quarter to nine, half past six and so on). I don't think they understand the clockwise directions either. I know one cannot read the dial on a clock face to tell time. It gets worse for each new generation as more use smartphones and digital displays for time.

Looks like a lot of companies will have to remove the clockwise/counter-clockwise wording in their instructions.

[pauperback-2]

Two boys outside a grocery store in a small town in Oregon inspecting a phone booth

"I'm gonna have to try that someday" - like it was a novelty to try at a amusement park

[i.am.vivian]

A kid approaches the Librarian's desk holding a book and says, "How do you work this? There's no display screen."

[rose-dee]

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@pocomocomputing wrote:

Looks like a lot of companies will have to remove the clockwise/counter-clockwise wording in their instructions.

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I think some already have.  I noticed when I loaded Windows 10 onto my new laptop that the picture tools now say "Rotate Left" or "Rotate Right".  I realized immediately why -- so many youngsters will say "Clockwise -- what does that mean??"

[booquemeister]

Do you still - turn off the light? - a hold-over expression from the gas-light era, I believe.

[booquemeister]

How about hang-up the phone or for that matter - dial the phone? though it kind of a misnomer even to still call it a phone since people rarely talk on it anymore.

[ypdc_dennis]

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@booquemeister wrote:
Do you still - turn off the light? - a hold-over expression from the gas-light era, I believe.

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I consider that a hold over from the electric era...  as in "turn off the electric power to the light"

Most of the lights in my house are switch controlled (computer and fire alarm are the exceptions). So they do get turned on and off.

-..-

[booquemeister]

Well, lighting history: candles, oil lamps, gas light, then electric light. Candles and oil lamps once lite are then, I think the term is, put-out. When the gas light innovation was popularized they too where lite and put out, but not by blowing out or snuffing the flame, they were put out by, key word here, "turning" a valve. So, turn out the light Marge, time for bed.

Terminology transfers from innovation to innovation, or you might say, is adapted.

Black folks sometimes say, "cut off the light", which always puzzled me. Old time "knife-switch" maybe?

[westernstargifts]

I haven't heard that expression for a long time!  Thanks for putting together all of those old expressions.  It made me smile.

But now I will be awake all night trying to think of more of them.

Anyway, good night and sleep tight!

[booquemeister]

Dashboard always puzzled me as a kid. What, something to dash your head on in a wreck?! (pre safety-belt '60s)

[maggiebvintage2010]

From Wikipedia:

Etymology. Originally, the word dashboard applied to a barrier of wood or leather fixed at the front of a horse-drawn carriage or sleigh to protect the driver from mud or other debris "dashed up" (thrown up) by the horses' hooves.

[booquemeister]

Yes, but, how did it migrate from the front of a buggy to its present automotive usage? Merely from position? being originally horseless-carriage's motors where in the rear and they retained the dashboard and maybe used it as a place to hang motor gauges, levers & petals from and when engineers moved motors forward the dashboard migrated into the cabin and by then the word dashboard's meaning had changed so we continued to calling it a dashboard even to this day? Phew, I still find it confusing.

Since Buggywhips have been mentioned as
The 20th century's symbol of Obsolescence
I proffer Paperweights as the 21th century's

[booquemeister]

So in other words; the buggy's dashboard protected you from flying dirt, like fenders.
The horesless-buggy still kept it's dashboard, like fenders.
The accouterments to operate a horseless-buggy were conveniently attached to it's dashboard.
Eventually, through the process of time, the modern-day dashboard developed.