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Radio Diaries: Old Words

There was a time when a browser was someone looking around a store, when a server was someone taking your order, and when Spam was a food you didn’t request.  Nowadays, however, those words are more likely to refer to the Internet.

There was even a time when the word “Internet” was new.  So was email, blog, broadband, download, hashtag.  And while I welcome these new words—and the technologies they describe—it makes me yearn for some of the old words I don’t hear anymore.  Words my grandparents used.

When my grandmother was feeling out-of-sorts, she said she was disgruntled.  It was a delicious word that sounded like what it meant.  She might have added that she was feeling punk—long before it was rock music.

A remedy for being disgruntled, my grandfather insisted, was gumption.  Get out of your chair and do something!  Cultivate a little spunk!  And whenever I got all dressed up, he would declare that I looked snazzy.

Nobody tells me I look snazzy anymore.  Or calls me Skeezix—the name of a comic strip character.  Grandpa also called me Scout as if I could really be his trusted guide.

I miss those old words and the people who used them.