Wordsmith said:

TootsNYC said:
I am sometimes quite anxious to buy things that are going out of style, because very soon they won’t be available to buy anymore, no matter how much I like them.

Those blue jeans fit well, but they’re going out of style, so I better get several pairs.

When I heard the “going out of style” topic on the show I immediately thought, “It makes sense to me.” And it still does, because, just as TootsNYC mentioned, you might not be able to get something once it’s out of style because it might not be available.

In the screenplay to Pulp Fiction, the character Pumpkin (played by Tim Roth) is described as someone who “smokes like it’s going out of style”. Which, at first blush, might not make sense if you have never heard the phrase before—as I hadn’t—since, this character smokes an awful lot! I asked my mother (an English major) what it meant and she explained to me that doing something like it’s going out of style is like saying, as she put it (to the best of my memory) “If it’s going out of style, I’d better use it before it’s gone.”

Thoughts?

Another possibility might be that doing or using something “like it’s going out of style” could mean that someone wants to do something as much as they can before it becomes “uncool” to do it, or get all the use out of something they can, or use up their reserves, before it’s no longer fashionable, and they’re stuck with that unfashionable “something.”

Regarding “rule of thumb”
In research, there’s the term “retrospective sensemaking” where you develop a rationale for the way things turned out after the fact, rather than really understanding WHY things happened based on the issues that people could consider AS the events took place. Is there a term for all these examples of “retrospective etymology”? I’m involved in 18th century living history, and there are dozens of these… most of which are simply not true… and they’ve even been collected into a book that’s sold in Williamsburg where they are presented as being factual. For instance “Son of a Gun” has been described as coming from what the illegitimate child of a sailor might be called because the mother of that child might give birth in the area of the ship where the guns were housed. Or calling shoes or feet “dogs” because shoes were made of dog skin. Or the classic urban legend story of the rhyme “Ring Around the Rosy” actually describing the black plague, when there is no evidence that it does. As a historian, I would love to get rid of a lot of these creative etymologies!

And, PeggyJean, I’d love to get a copy of that book for historical purposes, does it have an ISBN? I don’t support disinformation (or dysinformation) but I’m interested in what theories people will desperately concoct in lieu of an authentic and historical explanation.

I just got to listen to this podcast. Here are a couple of comments:

“Flounder” - you sort of skipped over one meaning and the use of flounder (I
think). The statement that the insurance proposal was floudering could
also have been a reference to the fact that is was flip-flopping and,
therefore, getting nowhere in the legislation. You did mention that
flounders flip-flop but didn’t really hit on the legislation flip-flopping.
Working in the DC area, I see this a LOT.

“Rule-of-Thumb” - Another use of Rule of Thumb is in the Fire/Rescue world.
In a hazardous materials (HazMat) situtation, the Rule of Thumb is this.
Hold up your thumb so it is covering the distance view of the suspected
hazmat incident. If you can see ANY of the incident around your thumb, you
are TOO close. Back up until you can’t see any of the incident. And THEN
call in the hazmat team.

Great podcasts. Makes my commute so much nicer. Or at least bearable.

Michael Bower
Ashburn, VA

Trevor, I wouldn’t have imagined that about typewriters. Thanks for the firsthand account. We’ll look forward to hearing more from Hong Kong, okay?