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A popular comic strip a century ago featured two bowing and scraping French dandies who treated each other with elaborate deference. “After you, my dear Alphonse,” one would say, only to be told, “No, after you, my dear Gaston.” Its protagonists made such a big impression that “Alphonse and Gaston” remains shorthand for two people …

A century ago, many American prisoners were made to march with their right hand resting on the right shoulder of the man before them. With heads bowed, no talking allowed, they could only shuffle awkwardly in what was called a “lock-step shuffle.” Today we apply that term to rigid conformists. They are “in lockstep.”

This slang term for money comes from a 1992 ad for Rally’s hamburgers that featured a fast-food guy at a rival chain who shouts “Cha ching!” every time he rings up a pricey new item. His shout mimicked the sound of old-time cash registers.

Beginning in the late nineteenth century men with drinking problems showed their resolve to quit by vowing that they’d rather drink water from the wagon that wetted down dusty roads than liquor. They were “on the water wagon.” Those who resumed drinking fell “off the wagon.”

That’s what soldiers in World War I’s verminous trenches called body lice, adapting “kutu,” the Malay word for louse. After the war American soldiers brought this term home along with their ribbons and medals. Kids liked the sound and the concept of cooties and took it over. (“Ooh. Cooties!”)

Gang Busters was a fast-paced cops ‘n’ robbers radio show that featured the sounds of glass breaking, whistles blowing, guns blasting, and sirens wailing. Within a few years of its 1935 debut, “like gangbusters” had become part of the vernacular. The catchphrase “come on like gangbusters” long outlived the 1957 demise of the show that …