Yesterday’s Catch Phrases Can Be Hard for Today’s Generation to Grasp

A month into the current baseball season when the Baltimore Orioles were losing 20 games in a row, I chuckled aloud over an item in the Morning Briefing column of The Times sports section. My wife wanted to know what was so funny, so I read her the item, a plaintive speech by Oriole manager Frank Robinson in which he told his players: “To hell with the Gipper; lets’s win one for me .”

My wife--who was not a contemporary of Knute Rockne and had never seen “Knute Rockne--All American”--didn’t see anything funny about the comment.

The conversation made me realize that the origins of a good many of the catch phrases we toss into everyday conversation are mysteries to today’s generation.

The Gipper, of course, was George Gipp, a legendary Notre Dame football player who died suddenly and tragically in 1926 while he was still an underclassman. Legend has it that coach Knute Rockne used the memory of Gipp to inspire his team in a half-time speech to go out and lick Army and “win one for the Gipper.” Ronald Reagan played George Gipp to Pat O’Brien’s Knute Rockne in “Knute Rockne--All American,” a hoked-up version of Rockne’s coaching career filmed a few years after he died in a plane crash.

We talk a lot these days about the “fifth column” in governments--meaning insiders who are working to undermine the establishment. But how many non-seniors know that the origin of this one goes back to the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s, when Francisco Franco moved on Madrid with four columns of Fascist troops. But the worst damage of all was done by infiltrators inside the city who were so effective that they were dubbed Franco’s “fifth column.”

Here are some other common aphorisms that have their roots in the early years of today’s seniors:

“I don’t know him from Adam’s off ox” is ascribed to Ring Lardner, but the reference has to do with the use of horses and oxen in teams to do heavy work or--in the case of horses--pull artillery pieces in the military. A rider sat on the “near” horse, while the “off” horse--and off ox in an oxen team--were riderless, unrecognized, and anonymous.

Calling a traitor a “Quisling” goes back to the early years of World War II when a Norwegian prime minister of that name collaborated with the Germans after they invaded his country.

“Everything is A-OK” originated with astronaut Alan Shepard when he made his first suborbital flight in 1960.

“I shall return” came not from “Rambo” I, II or III but rather was a promise made by Gen. Douglas MacArthur after he had been driven out of the Philippines early in World War II. And “I do not choose to run” was given us by Calvin Coolidge, who preferred his New England farm to another term in the White House.

One of the more common catchwords we use today is “hotbed,” to characterize immediate incipient action, usually violent. But how many of us know the “hotbed” originally meant a bed of earth heated by fermenting manure and usually covered with glass for raising plants quickly?

Fermenting manure is a good place to stop. You can probably add to this list endlessly. But the next time you use one of the “dying metaphors”--as George Orwell called them--you might want to pause and ask yourself what it really means.

As a footnote, I wonder how many people under 60 understood Conrad’s cartoon in the Aug. 4 Times? It showed Jim Murray, who had just been inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame, standing at the plate of a big league ball park and pointing backwards. The joke, of course, is a parody of Babe Ruth’s famous World Series gesture when he pointed to the center field bleachers, then hit one there.