I had a friend at med school called Fraser, or Frase. He was known by some as “To-coin-a”
My daughter has just shown me a little video in which a black American man bemoans the lack of new catchphrases by white people. He used to love saying “I don’t give a rat’s ass”, “you’re skating on thin ice, buddy!”, “get a load of that!”, and “get a grip”. So, he asks, why isn’t anyone inventing any new ones?
So what’s going on here? I suspect he’s just getting too old to be amongst the crowd where new things are happening. As usual, I’m going to mine my old books for source material in backing up my argument. Here is the heroine in one of my recent reads, an interwar detective fiction:
Even a hundred years ago, the expressions you used could date youAnother paragraph riddled with old timey phrases“No better than she should be” – and it’s always a she – I’ve heard this before and it’s never made any sense to me. No comment about brown eyes.I only know “I’m going to powder my nose” as a euphemism for “I need to pee”, and even that is old fashioned.I’ve heard “looking like the wreck of the Hesperus” before, and I knew it meant messy or ruined but didn’t know it was a reference to the poem of the same name by Longfellow. Actually I imagine most young people have never heard this phrase and wouldn’t be surprised if it vanishes into history. To be replaced with some new, fresh phrase of course.
