reviews-retro

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 Quote Verifier) uses his skill as a sleuth of sources to track what he calls “retrotalk”: “a slippery slope of puzzling …

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 …

Keyes (The Quote Verifier: Who Said What, Where, and When) distinguishes this work from other slang and idiom resources by explaining retro terms, that is, words and phrases that have been used for so long that people repeat them without knowing their origin or understanding their precise meaning. Examples include tabloid, initially a compressed medical …

Ralph Keyes is known as a writer’s writer. He earned that distinction by writing well on a variety of topics over a long period of time, sometimes directly for writers, and other times on the origins of modern American expression. His list of over a dozen books includes such titles as The Writer’s Book of …

April 4, 2009 Our everyday speech is filled with arcane references we don’t even know we’re making, terms Ralph Keyes calls verbal fossils.  Examples include “cooties” (a term for body lice that afflicted First World War soldiers while fighting in the trenches), “reading between the lines” (derived from people writing secret messages in invisible ink …

June 20, 2009 Gen X’ers with iPod buds stuck into their ears might puzzle over the meaning of terms derived from phonograph records: “flip side,” “like a broken record” and “in the groove.” Ralph Keyes is here to help with “I Love It When You Talk Retro” (St. Martin’s, $25.95), which describes the origins of …