I Love It When You Talk Retro: Hoochie Coochie, Double Whammy, Drop a Dime, and the Forgotten Origins of American Speech (Hardcover)

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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The phrase drinking the Kool-Aid is a mystery to young people today, as is 45rpm. Even older folks don't know the origins of raked over the coals and cut to the chase. Keyes (The QuoteVerifier) uses his skill as a sleuth of sources to track what he calls retrotalk: a slippery slope of puzzling allusions to past phenomena. He surveys the origins of verbal fossils from commercials (Kodak moment), jurisprudence (Twinkie defense), movies (pod people), cartoons (Caspar Milquetoast) and literature (brave new world). Some pop permutations percolated over decades: Radio's Take It or Leave It spawned a catch phrase so popular the program was retitled The $64 Question and later returned as TV's The $64,000 Question. Keyes's own book Is There Life After High School? became both a Broadway musical and a catch phrase. Some entries are self-evident or have speculative origins, but Keyes's nonacademic style and probing research make this both an entertaining read and a valuable reference work. (Apr.)
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From Booklist

In his excellent introduction to this language book, Keyes defines retrotalk as a “slippery slope of puzzling allusions to past phenomena,” allusions that employ terms he refers to as “verbal artifacts,” or phrases that hang around in our national conversation long after the topic they refer to has vanished from memory. Hard as it may be for those of a certain age to acknowledge, young people no longer understand references to 45 rpms, breadboxes, and Ma Bell. In addition, one’s comparisons also often fall along generational lines, as talking-head David Brooks discovered when he compared Hillary Clinton’s first debate performance to Emily Post and her second to Howard Beale. The names of the mistress of etiquette and the raving anchorman from the movie Network do not resonate with anyone younger than 50. The bulk of Keyes’ book is devoted to a pedestrian listing of such words and phrases and their origins, grouped in chapters related to the venues, such as boxing, politicians, movies, and comics, that gave rise to the terms. Still, the list makes addictive reading for word nerds and informative browsing for everyone else. --Joanne Wilkinson

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press; 1 edition (March 31, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312340052
• ISBN-13: 978-0312340056
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.9 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #142,016 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Not just for Wordies..., April 23, 2009

By	P. Offen (San Diego) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

When our daughter-in-law's parents turned 60 last December, my husband and I sent them a box of memorabilia from our common youth containing a "Don't Trust Anyone over 30" button, a "Make Love Not War" mug (with peace symbol), a "Groovy Chick" T-shirt, the Sunset Book of Macrame Plant Hangers, and our personal fave, a barbecue apron that read "I owned an 8-track player." This was all opened in front of the kids who were visiting for Christmas. The parents howled. The kids were...baffled.

Better that we had sent them Ralph Keyes "I Love It when You Talk Retro." Not just for serious Wordies, this collection of "retro terms" (which Keyes defines as a word or phrase...in current use yet [has]an origin that isn't current") is an equally fun read for your favorite boomer, clueless teenager, or simply the idle curious. It works well as a coffee table reference (we regularly find guests leafing through it) or nightstand favorite; our copy, in fact, has been regularly commuting back and forth between both places.

"I Love It When You Talk Retro" is a wonderful addition to anyone's personal library.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars More on words from a writer's writer, April 22, 2009

By	Virgil Hervey (Ohio) - See all my reviews

Ralph Keyes is more than a writer; he has fashioned himself into an expert on the origins of expressions used in everyday American speech. I Love It When You Talk Retro is a resource work, complete with notes, bibliography and an index, that can be breezed through with the ease of reading a personal essay or a work of fiction. What he has discovered is that the origins of our everyday speech can be a source of amusement, and he readily shares the amusing tidbits he has uncovered with his readers.

"After chasing down their origins I found myself repeatedly musing, `So that's where that comes from!' Keyes writes.

In I Love It When You Talk Retro Keyes posits that expressions that enrich our language such as "bigger than a breadbox," "show me the money" and "cut and run," while seeming to have achieved universal meaning over time, may not really be understood by those of generations that follow the one that spawned them, or by those for whom English is a second language. He calls these words and phrases retrotalk.

"To qualify as a retroterm," he writes, "a word or phrase must be in current use yet have an origin that isn't current."

Catch phrase references like "I've fallen and I can't get up!" "Where's the beef?" and "cha-ching" of TV commercial fame already a generation old, are not likely to be understood by today's teens. Neither are references to scratched or broken records likely to conjure up meaningful images to young people who download their music from computers directly to their I-pods. This is the kind of stuff that is fodder for Keyes who tirelessly back-tracks to the point of origin, because some of those we think we know, we do not. The term "wimp," for instance comes from the Popeye comic strip; a "lame duck" was an eighteenth-century stock trader who didn't pay his debts; to get "caught in a wringer" refers to a feature of an old fashioned washing machine.

"They are verbal fossils, ones that outlive the organism that made their impression in the first place," Keyes writes. "This could be a person, a product, a past bestseller, an old radio or TV show, an athletic contest, a comic strip, an acronym, or an advertisement long forgotten."

"Close, but no cigar!" "not worth a tinker's damn," "kick over the traces," you think you know them? You might want to look them up in I Love It When You Talk Retro. Or you might just want to go from cover to cover. It's more than just an interesting read; it's a journey into the past.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Pass it on...Pass it down..., June 25, 2009

By	G. Courter "LastWord" (Florida) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

When my father, age 94, hears a phrase like "juggernaut" he shows off with a convoluted--and usually incorrect--story about its origin. Now I have "I Love It When You Talk Retro" to set matters straight. And no, Dad, juggernaut is NOT a German WWI term, Ralph Keyes explains it comes from the Hindu deity Jagannath...see the book for the full explanation and photo. For me "Retro" falls into three categories: a slideshow of my life (Woodstock Nation, Flower Children, Rosebud, Chauncey Gardiner), explanations for things I always hear by never really could define (What the hell is a catbird seat anyway?)and letting the cat out of the bag about knowledge that made me feel superior (Potemkin village, Pangloss, Miss Haversham, and Comstockery.) What's interesting is that the value of this book will expand with time. The further we move away from these origins, the more confused we will become by their lingering references. Cultural literacy demands Retro fluency and this will be the classic reference. Even better: it's a fun read...crispy chips of insights. Bet you can't read just one section at a time. And Dad, Avatar, is also from the Hindu, and has nothing to do with birds and French!