I LOVE IT WHEN YOU TALK RETRO

As I predicted, I checked out another Ralph Keyes book on language, and also as predicted, it quickly verged on language-book exhaustion—or, possibly, this one wasn’t quite as good a read as Euphemania. Subtitled Hoochie Coochie, Double Whammy, Drop a Dime, and the Forgotten Origins of American Speech, this one deals with what Keyes calls “retrotalk”: allusions to past phenomena that still exist as artifacts in our language today. It’s an interesting concept, one that was first introduced to me as a teenager when my much-younger cousin asked me why we say “roll down the window” and I realized he’d never seen a car without automatic windows (!), and which is increasingly a topic among my peers as we get older, especially for my friends who are college professors and repeatedly shocked by the pop-culture references their students don’t understand. And I certainly learned a lot from this book (although I can’t remember any examples off the top of my head), particularly about older and more obscure phrase origins.

However, my problem with it was twofold: (1) The book doesn’t flow as well as Euphemania; it contains less high-level analysis and so often reads like lists of words and their origins organized in paragraph form. Admittedly, Keyes acknowledges this in his introduction, noting that it can be dipped into rather than read straight through, but I was reading it straight through, and at times it felt scattershot and tedious. Part of the tedium also stemmed from the fact that (2) the book is so broad-focused that at times it laps over into simply being an elementary history of the United States. I know there are plenty of people who don’t know what Watergate or the Cuban missile crisis are, but couldn’t they just look it up online or in an encyclopedia? Do we really need to explain them here? Isn’t anything considered common knowledge anymore? I wish Keyes had focused on some of the more obscure concepts and left the basic ones alone. Keyes does argue that there are plenty of people who don’t know the basic ones, and that someday most people won’t remember them, the way there are already many people who don’t remember pay phones, but that doesn’t make it any less dull to read sections that amount to “once upon a time, there were these things called record players, and here is the associated terminology.” This book would make an excellent primer on cultural references for non-Americans, the young, and anyone else who’d like to brush up them (I know post-WWII history always got serious short shrift in my schooling; I happened to learn most of it from a childhood spent reading Doonesbury, my former job as an editor of middle-grade history books, and a personal fascination with the era), but to me it was only of mild interest.