522. Turns of Phrase

       sphere from a root ball (Robert Crofts)

The ways in which people express themselves, whether in speech or in writing, bring me endless delight. Every individual has their own way of using language, as do whole groups with their myriad regional and ethnic dialects. In multicultural societies the syntax and idioms of different languages mix and mingle, generating new words. Societal changes also generate new words and phrases that sound the zeitgeist of the times. As I continue to grow older, the language and speech patterns of different eras co-exist in my mind, sometimes colliding, often giving me pause as I must consider which term is appropriate for a given audience at a given moment. Worryingly, there is another kind of pause that is increasingly entering my speech as I grope for the right word, just out of reach. But still and always, language itself—the taste of words on the tongue, verbal acrobatics, a friend’s unique turns of phrase—makes life worth living, even during the worst of times.

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I enjoy Merriam-Webster’s and Oxford Dictionaries’ Word of the Year. In the United States, Merriam-Webster has been announcing a Word of the Year since 2003, and a glance at the backlist reminds one of what has been on the collective mind. For 2022, it was gaslighting. In its announcement, the dictionary explains why:

In this age of misinformation—of “fake news,” conspiracy theories, Twitter trolls, and deepfakes—gaslighting has emerged as a word for our time.

A driver of disorientation and mistrust, gaslighting is “the act or practice of grossly misleading someone especially for one’s own advantage.” 2022 saw a 1740% increase in lookups for gaslighting, with high interest throughout the year.

When the term first re-emerged into common use, in the early years of the Trump administration, I hadn’t yet seen the George Cukor movie Gaslight (1944) and had only the haziest idea what it meant, but I knew that it referred to the psychological manipulation that made one believe black was white and doubt the evidence staring one in the face. I also suspected instinctively that if I were to be accused of gaslighting it was likely to be me who was being gaslit.

                  The Hustle [source: Twitter]

Oxford Dictionaries has chosen “goblin mode” as their 2022 Word of the Year. This was the first year that they had opened up the decision-making process to the English-speaking public, and, as they explain, the term emerged victorious by overwhelming public demand.


”Goblin mode is like when you wake up at 2am and shuffle into the kitchen wearing nothing but a long t-shirt to make a weird snack, like melted cheese on saltines”, as quoted in The Guardian newspaper. More recently, an opinion piece in The Times stated that “too many of us… have gone ‘goblin mode’ in response to a difficult year.”

Goblin mode wasn’t a term I was familiar with before, but I can see it now. While lounging on the couch might not in itself be troubling, lounging on the couch in the twilight zone of our extended COVID-19 hangover is one of the portentous signs of our times, when everything seems to be falling apart and we can no longer simply carry on.

In 2016 Oxford Dictionaries chose “post-truth” as their word of the year. They defined post-truth as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” In 2017, as the goblin Presidency of Donald Trump got underway, with its promotion of “alternative facts”, I used “post-truth” in my first-year composition classes to sound the alarm about fake news and the need to examine one’s ideological biases and to verify the sources of one’s information. In the post-truth era, not only was the truth hard to find but, increasingly, no longer mattered. Now, if the facts did not agree with what people wanted to believe, they would simply be disregarded.

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When used to deceive, language becomes debased as a medium that ought to be a means of drawing us closer to one another. Although I have led with words that have come to define our troubled times, I would rather leave you with other words, idioms, and turns of phrase that hold special meaning for me, bringing me closer to the people I love and the histories that have shaped me.

Granny Lane’s apple crumble (delicious.com)

I do not love English in a nationalist sense, seeking to claim it as the greatest language there is. It just happens to be my mother-tongue, the particular clothing of my thought (to paraphrase Arundhati Roy). For instance, it is not because she is English that I love my friend Margaret, but ever since she described the particular pleasure of an English apple crumble the way it is supposed to be made, with just the right proportions of butter, sugar, and flour (and/or oats) in the topping melting and crusting into the deliciousness of the baked apple filling, I have loved her all the more. Just recalling her description of a perfect apple crumble has given me as much pleasure as actually eating it.

Even when, in my teenage years, we seemed to do little but argue, my maternal uncle Ted and I used to take special pleasure in the language we used in speaking to each other. Uncle Ted would make a point of using the most inflated language possible—never a short word when a ridiculously long one, however obscure, was available, and never a simple sentence when a hilariously convoluted one could be constructed. I would do my best to respond in kind, but honestly, he outdid himself every time and there was no way my attempts at repartee could match his quick wit.



I still remember some of Uncle Ted’s characteristic expressions, more than half a century later. Sometimes, on a weekday evening, in the twilight zone between the last interesting program on television and bedtime, in the sure knowledge that one would have to drag oneself up in a few short hours and get ready for work or school all over again, he would announce, 

”I’m smacked.”

dry aloo matar by Vandana Chauhan

I’ve never heard anyone else say that they’re smacked in the sense that Uncle Ted meant it—that somehow, even if he had just eaten, he was vaguely unsatisfied and needed something, he knew not what. That something was usually something   more to eat, and this declaration on his part was often followed by, “You wouldn’t knock up one of your smashing potato curries, would you, Glad?”

Mum would often happily oblige him, but if she demurred, saying that it was too late or that she was too tired, Uncle Ted would sigh and make himself a bowl of cold cereal, noting that it would “save time in the morning.”

   northern gannet (Wikimedia)

Another word Uncle Ted would use that I’ve never heard from anyone else was also related to food. Often complaining that we children were eating him out of house and home, he would often refer to us as gannets, meaning that we were greedy and perpetually hungry. He wasn’t wrong there, so there was no point in contradicting him. In fact I suspect that we rather took it as a point of pride.

My Auntie Bette had a huge repertoire of idioms and could turn a colorful phrase with the best of them. Having been born in 1919, she could draw on language that was current in the Music Hall era, before going to the movies became the dominant form of entertainment. I wish I had written down the phrases she would come up with, ones that I had never heard from anyone else. Probably the one I find myself using the most is, You’d make a better door than a window, particularly useful when someone is blocking your view.

My parents used language in their own special ways too, and to this day, even though, like Uncle Ted and Auntie Bette, they have both left us, I frequently find myself following up a phrase with “as Mum (or Dad) would say”.

One of the words Dad used quite often was hoo-ha. He might come home exasperated and say that someone had created a big hoo-ha at work. Alternatively, he would say, “Tcha! What a nuisance!”—pronounced noo-ee-sance, which to my mind, ought to be the way the word is pronounced. Mum’s pronunciation was also uniquely her own. In the U.K. the word vacuuming was never used, the operative verb being “to hoover” (using the brand name as the Americans used kleenex for tissues). After we came to the U.S. and actually came to own our first vacuum cleaner, Mum did adopt the American terminology (probably also because of her anti-capitalist bent), but made a point of pronouncing it in three syllables: vac-u-um. I never asked her why; perhaps it was one of her personal stands against assimilation.

Mum had terrific dress sense and followed the fashions avidly, but as she grew older she was careful not to look like mutton dressed as lamb, as she put it. A quintessentially English exclamation she used quite often—her counterpart of Dad’s “hoo-ha!”—was, “What a carry-on!” By this she meant that it was much ado about nothing, something that ought to have been dealt with without making a fuss, or simply that it was a hassle.

“Carry-on”, as a noun, and to “carry on”, as a verb, have interesting genealogies in the U.K. The current usage on mugs and T-shirts as the slogan Keep Calm and Carry On (with variations ad nauseam) hearkens back to the brink of the Second World War, when the slogan, printed on millions of posters, made a virtue of the much-vaunted British stiff upper lip, exhorting them to keep on keepin’ on, unquestioningly, without making a fuss. But another cultural phenomenon, the 31 “Carry On” films produced between the late 1950s and late 1970s, complicated the meaning of the term, and introduced the ”carry-on” closer to the sense in which my mother used it.

original poster for Carry on Cleo, 1964 (Wikipedia)

By the time I came of age in the 1970s the Carry On films had had their heyday and for that reason I have never found them side-splittingly funny as so many Britons appear to have done; in fact, I can’t even understand their humor, but to the extent that I can, find them decidedly distasteful, and in particular, extremely sexist. But apparently their appeal lay in the way they made a mockery of that very British stiff upper lip that underpinned WWII propaganda by taking everything as far over the top as possible—in fact, by creating a carry-on rather than doggedly carrying on.

the menu in the “Spam” Monty Python sketch (Wikimedia Commons)

Remember the hilarious Monty Python skit, Spam (1970)—not the Spam of junk mail, but the Spam of junk food? In it, a woman in a cafe insists loudly that she doesn’t want any Spam in her fry-up. Her long-suffering husband tries to calm her: “Hush dear, don’t make a fuss, I’ll have your Spam.” But she is determined to create a right carry-on, as did the Monty Python gang, who captured the zeitgeist of their time as well, rightly rejecting the wartime mentality of austerities and self-sacrifice and ersatz food and having the temerity to demand the real thing.

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I suppose I began this meandering piece with the urgency of understanding how language is used to obscure meaning and have ended with the joys of turning a phrase, each of us in our own unique way, to convey exactly who we are and what we mean.

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