Martha Barnette

And I mean, think about elderly.

That's somehow fragile to me.

I've seen recently people have been suggesting welderly if you're in good shape and you are taking good care of yourself, you're welderly.

Yeah, exactly, exactly, because these self-conscious coinages, like seasoned citizen or vintage citizen, I mean, it's just, you know, it's manufactured, it's imposed by somebody else.

What you want to see in words that...

the way that words stick around is when they bubble up naturally and they just sort of sort of bubble up without your um without you really noticing like the word selfie for example it's such a useful word and we didn't have that word you know 30 or 40 years ago but it just kind of began to be used sort of unselfconsciously you know somebody we didn't have a language academy that said okay everybody's going to use the word selfie now to describe this

this term.

But yeah, if you ever hear of a better word than senior citizen, which just makes me shudder, I would love to hear it.

Right.

So I guess we just have to grow into that word and see how we keep describing ourselves.

Well, one of my favorites is the word cocktail, because you might be surprised to learn that the word cocktail probably comes from an old use of the word cocktail referring to a kind of horse.

because it used to be that people would dock horses' tails.

You know, if they were just a mixed breed working horse, not a thoroughbred, they might dock the tail, and the tail would sort of stick up like a cock's tail, like a rooster's tail.

And so people would refer to these kinds of horses with docked tails as cocktails.

And around the same time in the early 1800s,

people were thinking about mixed drinks as this new thing.

It was kind of adulterated.

You know, why would you add ingredients to a perfectly good whiskey or a perfectly good spirit?

And people considered those mixed drinks adulterated and impure.

And so people started referring to these mixed drinks the same way they referred to these horses that were not thoroughbreds.