This fashion too shall pass
Idon’t know about you, but I was terribly disappointed when doomscrollingwas selected as New Zealand’sword for 2020. Words and phrases are fashionable and I predict doomscrolling will be shortlived. With all the traffic roaring through intergenerational homes at Christmas and New Year, old phrases and sayings resurfaced.
Somebody bade me farewell with the cliche: ‘‘Don’t do anything that I wouldn’t do’’, laughing hysterically before following it up with the sidesplitting, ‘‘If you can’t be good, be careful’’. Oh, tee bloody hee, I hadn’t heard that one before.
With our borders closed and our wings clipped, maybe we should reintroduce the once muchbandied-about and hard-to-reach destination of Timbuktu. In the new normal, anywhere other than here can be now regarded as Timbuktu.
Descriptions of gormless small fry’s facial expressions used to include sour puss and stunned mullet. Constant scowlers had faces that looked like a slapped arse and were warned not to hold the expression in case ‘‘the wind will change’’. As a child Imisheard that phrase and was left wondering who Wyndall Change was, and what his face looked like.
(This isn’t the only phrase or title I didn’t hear correctly. When Janet Frame’s Owls Do Cry became the great New Zealand novel, I originally heard it as Towels Do Dry.)
If one had ideas above one’s station or tickets on yourself, you risked being accused of behaving like Lady Muck. Old people and parents were beyond the pale wrinklies, who broke up stirs (parties) to deliberately bum out the vibe.
Bright sparks, too, were in for a ribbing and were scathingly teased as being clever clogs with tell-tale four-eyes glasses.
I grew up in a small town with a high teenage pregnancy rate, and girls considered fast were described mysteriously as ‘‘no better than they ought to be’’, with the morals of a town bike. Tech alert: this slur has now been updated to town e-bike.
Women were called birds or dolly birds and later chicks or chicky babes, who might, if a chap was lucky, ‘‘go off like a rocket’’. Sexually desirable boys or men were spunks or stud muffins with dried arrangements down there in the dangerous trouser department.
Bench seats in cars changed sexual behaviour in New Zealand, resulting in girls having to go up north for awhile to disappear when the bun in the oven, or football up their jersey, started to show.
Unsavoury predatory males were described as lounge lizards, who wore brothel creepers and called women who spurned their advances huckorymolls. A lounge lizard fortunate enough to secure a girlfriend would call them their squeeze while judgmental onlookers branded them bimbos.
Hippy men would refer to their female partners as ‘‘my lady’’ to denote ownership and a pseudo sense of chivalry. If a girlfriend was getting mouthy, hippy blokeswere told: ‘‘Hey, man, control your lady.’’
When people got angry they spat the dummy, flipped their wig, did their block, threw awobbly, and kicked up bobsy-di. Such behaviour was described as amajor freakout and a total bummer that went against the groovy grain of the cool protocol.
New Zealanders weren’t given to being overly effusive, but they did adopt the words, fabulous, fantastic, and super, with awesome remaining in vogue for aeons.
If I had to choose a phrase for 2020, it would the ubiquitous stalling-for-time answer people in a tight spot use while being grilled by radio journalists when they employ the greasy compliment: ‘‘That’s a good question.’’