Tag: language

Boomers Were the “Peanut Gallery”

Recently, Mister Boomer was thinking about the idioms spoken by the parents of boomers, and how you don’t hear many of them any more. Boomer parents would say phrases such as, “that’s the cat’s meow,” or “keep your shirt on.” It makes sense that so many of these common idioms heard in the boomer years have disappeared since they originated in the 1930s and 40s, or even earlier; as children grow, they hear and internalize the slang and catchphrases spoken by their parents, until they reach their teens and adopt the phrases of their own generation. (Mister Boomer has explored two slang words of the Boomer Generation that have, to some extent, survived to the present: Boomers Knew What was Cool, Man)

The phrase that sprang to mind recently was, “no comments from the peanut gallery.” As Mister B swirled the words around in his skull, like examining aged wine in a glass, he immediately thought the phrase had to originate in the Boomer Era with the Howdy Doody Show (1947-60). This TV show combined live actors with puppets, including the show’s namesake, a puppet-boy dressed in cowboy garb. Each show had a live audience of kids who sat on school-style bleachers that was labeled as the “Peanut Gallery.” Since “peanut” was a common slang term for “small” (like “shrimp”), it seemed logical that the Peanut Gallery would seat the little ones.

In 1943, Howdy Doody was a children’s radio program. “Peanut Gallery” was a phrase used on the show to represent the listening audience of kids. When the program became a TV show in 1947, the term came with it, only then it was the literal representation of the kids in the audience. (Incidentally, Clarabell, one of the characters on the show, was a clown who spoke only by honking a horn. He was played by Bob Keeshan, who boomers will recall later became Captain Kangaroo [1955-1984].)

Mister Boomer’s earliest memories of watching TV was the Howdy Doody Show. The TV program, considered pioneering educational children’s programming at the time, was credited with helping sell more TVs in the 1950s than any previous program. As more boomer families bought TVs and watched, the show’s audience grew — and with it, their ability to sell advertising sponsorship to national brands like Kellogg’s cereal.

After a little investigation, however, Mister B found that “peanut gallery” did not originate with Howdy Doody. Au contraire, mon ami! “Peanut gallery” has been around for many decades. At the turn of the century, vaudeville theaters called the most affordable seats — usually the top rows of the upper balcony — the “peanut gallery” because the cheapest snack available for purchase there was peanuts. Since this echelon of theater-goers was considered the most uneducated and unruly, “comments from the peanut gallery” referred to their physically tossed peanuts and verbal heckling that were hurled to the stage to express disapproval with the performers. So, if boomers were riding in the car with their parents and one turned around to say, “Hey, I don’t want any comments from the peanut gallery,” they weren’t referring to the Howdy Doody Show, they were telling the kids to behave.

Howdy Doody’s Peanut Gallery did influence another player on the stage of boomer experience, though. The cartoonist Charles Schulz was about to syndicate his comic strip, Li’l Folks to newspapers in 1948. The comic syndicators thought the title of his comic strip would be confusing to readers since Little Folks and Li’l Abner already existed, so they suggested he change the strip’s title. Faced with a name change, Schulz chose Peanuts, a reference to both the Howdy Doody radio show and the unruly commenters of vaudeville. His characters would be kids who made their comments on the cultural stage of the Boomer Era, without any adults present.

On rare occasion the term still pops up on the national stage, but one has to wonder if Millennials and Gen Zers, let alone their kids, have any idea what it means.

Did your parents use the idiom on you and your siblings, boomers? What are your recollections about hearing the phrase, “peanut gallery?”

Please note: This is an edited version of a post first published by Mister Boomer on March 12, 2016.

Boomers Knew What was Cool, Man

Every generation has its slang. Some words seem to sprout up spontaneously to spread across a population, while others tend to carry over from decade to decade. The use of slang during the boomer years is no exception, though the sheer quantity of phrases and slang words that help define the time may be unparalleled in history.

The dichotomy of the tumultuous sixties was echoed in the language of the time. In terms of slang, the beginning of the decade was mostly a continuation of the 1950s, being greatly influenced by the Beat Generation and the speech of jazz musicians. The latter half is when things began to radically change, as countercultural movements in music, fashion, drugs and anti-war sentiment all placed a colorful stamp on American English. Words, especially in the latter half the 1960s, appeared faster than you can say, “Can you dig it?” (itself a phrase that may have its origins decades if not centuries before).

Through the expanding slang lexicon of the 1960s, however, Mister Boomer peppered his daily speech mainly with two words, at least one of which has remained current in today’s culture: “man” and “cool.””

From song lyrics to TV shows, movies to street corners, man has been chronicled as an inherent part of the speech pattern of the boomer decade. Its origins may go back decades, as most associate its popular use with musicians in the 1930s and ’40s (i.e., “Man, that cat can swing!”). It was then picked up by servicemen from World War II, then by the Beat Generation, and brought to the culture at large.

The definition of man was rather generic — and like a lot of slang, depended on the usage to ascertain its full meaning. Often spoken at the beginning or ending of a sentence, it could be used to punctuate the phrase with an emotion like surprise, delight or disbelief. “Man, that was groovy!” would therefore have a different inflection than, “The Man is incapable of listenin’, man.” In general, man was either a question sent out to all within earshot (i.e., “did you hear what I said?”) or an exclamation that could have been a shortened form of mankind (as Robin might have said, “Holy mankind, Batman!”) However, as just noted, man was not to be confused with The Man, which was used as a term of disapproval for a person in authority, especially a “fat-cat” employer or government official. (That is, “working for The Man every night and day,” or “The Man is out to take away your freedom, man.”)

On The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, Maynard G. Krebbs (Bob Denver) espoused the slang of his adopted persona as a member of the Beat Generation. Words such as “daddy-O” and “nowheresville” tended to fade through the sixties, but “man” and “cool” persisted. Speaking of which, Hans Conried is pretty cool, right?

Cool, on the other hand, appears to have an extremely long history. As such, it is one slang word that could very well be the longest-lived one that we speak today. Surely there are instances noted in movies, interviews and music where cool is used, especially by jazz musicians in the 1920s and ’30s. Some word historians point to cool being used in Shakespeare, and phrases such as, “cool as a cucumber,” or “one cool customer,” were common at the turn of the nineteenth century. Still others say cool was used in some slang form as far back as Beowulf. The usage of the word where the meaning is most associated with that used during the boomer years and on to today — i.e., from a detached sense of style and sophistication to something of the highest order — appears to have spread quicker in post-war America as the Beat Generation dispensed it in poetry, performance and speech.

For a young Mister Boomer, the words he had heard in neighborhood conversations eventually seeped into his brain and became part of his daily vocabulary. “Man, it was cool” would therefore completely describe a neighborhood teen’s tri-carb GTO to a group of schoolyard friends, who in turn could really dig where he was coming from.

Slang can differ from culture to culture, across economic strata and even neighborhood to neighborhood, in Mister Boomer’s experience. Yet as children at the dawn of the Media Age, how could boomers not consume that which would make them cool, man?

Of the dozens of groovy, far out words that arrived in our youth, what slang has stuck with you all these years, boomers?

Please note: This post is an edited version that was originally published by Mr. Boomer on September 25, 2011.