I was thinking the other day of words I grew up with, but which you don’t hear much anymore.

My Dad, for example, used to say when someone was obstinate that: “you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink!” It was relevant back then because we had horses, and I can remember putting water in front of them which they wouldn’t drink…though I knew that they must have been thirsty at the time. They were just being stubborn.

Dad also used to use the word “lumbago” when his back was bothering him. I just assumed that everyone had “lumbago,” and that it was something that came on you more as you got older. Now, we hear words like “disk impingement” or “spinal stenosis,” or some other medical-sounding word. However, “lumbago” still describes it no matter what medical spin you put on it.

As to sports, I always enjoyed listening to Van Miller when he was the radio play-by-play announcer for the Buffalo Bills. When a guy was down and slow to get up, Miller used to say: “Well, he just got his bell rung,” like it was no big deal. Now, you never hear that. Instead, they pull the guy off the field and put him in a blue tent for a concussion protocol. But, Van Miller would probably still say–“Well, he got his bell rung!” Maybe it wasn’t scientific…but he got the point across.

Sometimes my Mom would explain something unexplainable or that just happened by happenstance as “it was just a big kettle of fish.” We all knew what she meant though we had never actually seen a big kettle of fish. I haven’t heard that reference in years, but I still know what it means.

What about the words “slower than molasses in January?” Have you heard that phrase lately? As a kid we had molasses around the barn to sometimes mix with cattle feed. I knew that it is was “gooey” and especially slow to pour when it was cold outside. So, I knew what “slower than molasses in January” meant. Yet, I also knew that it could apply not only to cow feed but to a human being who was being intentionally slow when they could have been moving faster.

In the 1950’s the word “McCarthyism” was used to describe the political phenomenon of Senator Joseph McCarthy who was accusing, it seemed, half of Washington of being communist…with no basis in fact. If you were to use that word today, people wouldn’t understand it. They do understand that we have our own hallucinatory political accusations going on today…but we call it something else. Things keep happening but the names we give them can change.

Finally, there is an old saying which you don’t hear much anymore: “What is good for the goose, is good for the gander.” Apparently, the words go way back to “Aesop’s Fables” and meant that what is good for the male is also good for the female–and vice versa.

However, I have always thought that, in a way, these words were related to the golden rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” i.e. we are all equal and we should treat each other that way.

Sometimes words change or disappear, but the underlying human condition that created them remains the same.

Rolland Kidder is a Stow resident.