Thursday, May 28, 2015

Words and Phrases Remind Us of the Way We Word

Sent to me by e-mail:  Some of these expressions predate me by quite a few years, even decades.  But I love the classics:
Words and Phrases Remind Us of the Way We Word

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."  A bevy of readers have asked me to shine light on more faded words and expressions, and I am happy to oblige:

Back in the olden days we had a lot of moxie.  We’d put on our best bib and tucker and straighten up and fly right.  Hubba-hubba!  We’d cut a rug in some juke joint and then go necking and petting and smooching and spooning and billing and cooing and pitching woo in hot rods and jalopies in some passion pit or lovers’ lane.  Heavens to Betsy!  Gee whillikers!  Jumpin’ 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.

Like Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle and Kurt Vonnegut’s Billy Pilgrim, we have become unstuck in time.  We wake up from what surely has been just a short nap, and before we can say, “I’ll be a monkey’s uncle!” or “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, poof, poof go the words of our youth, the words we’ve left behind.  We blink, and they’re gone, evanesced from the landscape and wordscape of our perception, like Mickey Mouse wristwatches, hula hoops, skate keys, candy cigarettes, little wax bottles of colored sugar water and an organ grinder’s monkey.

Where have all those phrases gone?  Long time passing.  Where have all those phrases gone?  Long time ago: Pshaw.  The milkman did it.  Think about the starving Armenians.  Bigger than a bread box.  Banned in Boston.  The very idea!  It’s your nickel.  Don’t forget to pull the chain.  Knee high to a grasshopper.  Turn-of-the-century.  Iron curtain.  Domino theory.  Fail safe.  Civil defense.  Fiddlesticks!  You look like the wreck of the Hesperus.  Cooties.  Going like sixty.  I’ll see you in the funny papers.  Don’t take any wooden nickels.  Heavens to Murgatroyd!  And awa-a-ay we go!

Oh, my stars and garters!  It turns out there are more of these lost words and expressions than Carter had liver pills.  This can be disturbing stuff, this winking out of the words of our youth, these words that lodge in our heart’s deep core.  But just as one never steps into the same river twice, one cannot step into the same language twice.  Even as one enters, words are swept downstream into the past, forever making a different river.

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.  We can have archaic and eat it, too.

See ‘ya later, alligator!

After while, crocodile!
 

Monday, May 25, 2015

IRANIAN SPECIAL FORCES COMMANDER: ‘OBAMA HAS NOT DONE A DAMN THING’ TO FIGHT ISIS

The title pretty much says it all.  But there is more.
Iranian elite paramilitary force leader Major General Qassem Soleimani accused the United States of having “no will” to fight the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria and blasted President Barack Obama as not having “done a damn thing” to quell the terrorist insurgency. The remarks follow news that Shiite terrorist group Hezbollah is planning to increase its presence in Iraq to combat ISIS.
  
Oh, just peachy--Hezbollah increasing its presence in Iraq to fight ISIS!  That should make the region and the world a safer place (not!).   On this Memorial Day, we need to remember that the United States has been a powerful force for good in the world for more than 200 years; and where the US is absent, evil flourishes.  
  

Saturday, May 02, 2015

How to preach sermons that don’t suck

From the Covenant blog, where there is more.  (Be sure and read it all.)
Let’s be honest, most sermons today are terrible.  They are boring.  They ramble.  They sound like bad imitations of high school book reports.  Listening to a sermon today is often like listening to the teacher from the old Charlie Brown cartoons.  And I believe the reason why preaching has gotten so bad, particularly in liturgical churches, is rather obvious.  We do not have good preachers because we do not understand what preaching is for.

Like being a great cello player or a great center fielder, a great preacher is born with a certain degree of raw talent that then must be honed and trained in order for the preacher to reach his or her full potential.  But in liturgical churches in the contemporary West, we see preaching as less important than other aspects of ministry.  We assume that anyone can be a great preacher and that the honing of preaching skills ought to be relatively low on the clergy’s priority list, something to tend to once all the other fires are put out.  We reap what we sow.  We treat preaching like it is nothing, and thus it becomes nothing.

What I offer here are a few maxims on what makes great preaching.  They are culled from my own experience both as a preacher and as someone who listens to sermons.  I am no expert, and this list is nowhere near exhaustive, but it is a start. I hope that others will build on this.  “Faith comes through hearing,” Paul says (Romans 10:17).  It is no secret that the Church in the West is in decline, and I see no scenario for its revival that does not include a renewal of great preaching.
Read it all.