George Grant: Bringing back “the cat’s pajamas”

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Today is Friday July 21st. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Myrna Brown.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. Up next: Word Play for July. Today, we’re going to learn a neologism, a new word, in this case an invented word, “obsologism.”

WORLD Commentator George Grant came up with it. A word describing words that have become obsolete. And while some of them deserve to rest in peace, others might be worth resurrecting.

GEORGE GRANT, COMMENTATOR: Like fashions, words and phrases can come and go. English is a bit of a hodgepodge to begin with—but now that it is an international language, changes in our common parlance can occur at a dizzying pace. With haunting lines taken from his Four Quartets, T.S Eliot reminds us of this:

Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still.

Words and phrases that fall out of favor and out of usage are called “obsologisms” or archaisms. This fate befalls even perfectly good words and phrases—particularly if those words or phrases are slang expressions. But of late, I’ve been thinking that perhaps some of them may well warrant a second look.

My father-in-law would often describe things he really liked as the cat’s pajamas. Coined during the jazz and flapper age of the Roaring Twenties, the phrase connoted something that was surprisingly wonderful, excellent, as good as it gets. My grandmother once dismissed a gossipy ladies’ afternoon tea as “wags drinking scandal water.” Apparently, scandal water was a common Victorian epithet for tea.

Twitterpated sounds like a modern tech term used to describe something trending on social media but it is actually an adjective first cited in the Oxford English Dictionary in 1942 meaning head-over-heels lovestruck.

Tickety-Boo is a phrase still used from time to time in England. First used in 1938, it means “all is well, A-OK.” Someone who is perpetually tickety-boo and always smiling might be described as a gigglemug. While a pang-wangle is someone who is able to grin-and-bear-it despite the fact that all is not tickety-boo.

Fudgel means pretending to work when you’re actually just frittering time away; hideosity is extreme ugliness; Twattle is mindless chatter; to hornswoggle is to swindle or scam; to fuzzle means to confuse; to groak is silently staring at someone as they eat, hoping they will invite you to join them; a growlery is a Dickensian term for “a place where you can retreat from the world when you’re in bad mood.”

There are dozens of great fossil words like ado, avast, and bandy; caboodle, dint, and druthers; eek, fettle, and loggerheads; shrive, shrove, and shrift; sophronize, tarnation, and turpitude. All of these once common slang expressions have fallen out of fashion, out of favor, and out of usage. But I for one think at least a few of them deserve a second chance. So, if you know your onions and are not a hobbledehoy fiddling with your gullyfluff why don’t you help me bring the best of them back—even if only for the sake of auld-slang-syne?

I’m George Grant.

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