Growing up in Tokyo meant that unless my parents wanted to fork over serious dough (the dough that all my friends parents had no problem forking over), we got 1 English television show a week.  For the entire time that we lived there (about 6 years), it was Party of Five, or Melrose Place. That’s it. I think it turned me off television (let’s be honest, how could those two shows not have?) and created addicts out of the rest of my family.  But that’s neither here nor there (but could be used as supporting evidence that I am in fact adopted, should ever the need arise).

The summer we moved back to America, I used to watch Nickelodeon a lot, and got into Hey Arnold.  Arnold was a really cool self-conscious football headed geek, who had quite a few quirks.  Even quirkier was his grandfather who he lived with. He would always share little anecdotes with Arnold about how back in his day he had to ‘walk five miles in the snow to get to school’, you know the types of stories.  The stereotypical stories that old people in Hollywood productions always seem to tell.

As I got older, I used to hear a lot of my grandfathers stories, most of which weren’t anything like the grandfathers from the shows and movies of my childhood.  This is partially because my grandfather didn’t feel the need (and still doesn’t) to guilt me into feeling thankful for trivial things that he didn’t have available to him in his time when he was my age (and also because I’m sure I didn’t complain much).  He is also a very funny man (I have to get it from somewhere right? I think it skips a generation, like the hair loss gene), and so even when he does decide to share a story about ‘back when I was your age’ it doesn’t contain the ‘oh no, here we go again’ mood that is most commonly portrayed during geriatric story-telling sessions.

Recently I’ve been paying attention to expressions that people use often (or ever) in conversation.  It’s funny how expressions that people use are so time-relevant.  Many expressions derive almost all of their meaning contextually based on when they came about or rose in popularity.  Some die when the social context in which they make sense changes drastically enough to no longer support their use, and others hold their meaning regardless of how much changes, adequately withstanding the test of time.

The other day, my grandfather said with all of my visitors that have been coming, and all the work I’ve been doing that I must be ‘busier then Adolf Hitler on D-Day’.  I let out a slight chuckle, but have since been plagued with the idea of Hitler on D-Day.  I have never inquired as to how busy Hitler was on D-Day but based on my broad understanding of the events that occurred on that day, I always figured he was very busy. I mean, the leader of an empire trying to conquer the world must surely always be busy, right? Apparently not. I’m sure this is old news to any history buffs, or television watchers who frequent the History Channel, but part of the reason that D-Day was in fact D-Day was because German tanks couldn’t be mobilized without direct orders from Hitler himself, and his aide refused to wake him up.  On D-Day, Adolf Hitler was sleeping in Berlin. He got up at 11:00 AM. On a Tuesday!?

Learning things like this (which I learned on the Internets, so all of it could be wrong, but I’m a trusting guy) makes me question my grandfathers sayings.  Am I not picking up on his sarcasm after over 80 years of finely tuning it?  Does he not know how much of a slacker Hitler really was (seriously, you need help from the Japanese? Way to settle Hitler)? Or does he just think playing host and playing on the Internet for a paycheck is easy work?

The natural progression of thought leads us to ponder what kinds of things we will say to the second generation below us?  I can see myself saying things like “in my day, we had to dial-up on a phone line that was plugged into the wall and sent along wires to access limited amounts of data” or “when I was your age, most computers couldn’t read minds, so we had these things called keyboards and mice”.  We can already say “when I was your age, we hadn’t had a non-white male President” (I still can’t believe it). Who knows what types of expressions will come about in our time, I’ve already phased out Einstein as an insult and created space for Google to fill in.

What I really want to know, is what expressions we have already lost from generations past.  ‘You look prettier in that dress than J. Edgar Hoover’ or ‘I had the hots for your mother like the British had the hots for the White House’ (1814 bitches, look it up).  Maybe even ‘his jaw dropped faster then the DOW Jones in 2009′. No? Too soon?

Tags: Adolf Hitler, Adoption, America, Anthem Of Our Dying Day, D-Day, DOW Jones, Grandpa, Hey Arnold, History Channel, Hollywood, J. Edgar Hoover, Japanese, Melrose Place, Nickelodeon, Party of Five, Story Of The Year, Television, Tokyo, White House

This entry was posted on Friday, March 13th, 2009 at 10:51 pm and is filed under Reflections, Stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.