FUTURE SHOCK
OBSCURE ORIGINS OF COMMON PHRASES
and some OBSOLETE ones too
In one week I heard three almost-obsolete phrases used…so you can safely assume I’m hanging out with people my own age, lol, lol. With language changing at a speed equivalent to Alvin Toffler‘s Future Shock, that is phrases, terms, and words I grew up with are now nearly obsolete and now there is a host of new words or rather in my opinion old words and the younger generations have assigned new meanings to them – but more about that later.
First off, I heard someone say, “You don’t know diddly-squat about….”. So what exactly is diddly–squat? I think you can pretty much guess that anyone under the age of 50 is going to say, “you don’t know shit“ and that’s the meaning of diddly-squat. Actually in this case, squat is a euphemism for the word shit.
The original term doodly-squat dates from about 1934. There is no definite origin except that the word doodly was used to refer to: a fool, a Union soldier, a penis, cheating…well you get the gist. And squat was the nice way to say shit. About 1963 Diddly-squat appeared in dictionaries and in 1964, Diddly-shit.
Then in a TCM movie (do we ever watch anything else !!??), one of the characters went “on the lam”. The roots of this term are in Old English; lam, lammister, on the lam all refer to a hasty departure and were common in thieve’s slang. The allusion in lam is to beat or beat it in Old English meaning to leave.
Lastly, I heard the term larder which I know to mean a cool place built to store the food supply prior to refrigeration or ice boxes. Larders were small rooms or areas usually adjacent to the kitchen. This room would have shelves and maybe a small window covered in fine mesh to keep air circulating but flies out. Some would have hooks on the wall to hang a slab of meat.
I know this next is worthy of a blog post unto itself so I will only use one word as an example and I know I used it before. Today’s younger generation and I’m embarrassed to say that my soon-to-be-34 daughter, wife and mother of two darling little girls uses this term regularly. As in, “so we went to this random restaurant” and “I don’t know, it was some random girl” and “why don’t you just get some random toy” – WTF? A new language in the making. RANDOM means: adjective
—Idiom
Bill Ding and his band of clowns are the security patrol for this blog site. He is a favorite toy from the 50*s. By the way sometimes a blog is just an ego-maniacal stream of conscience.
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