Those of you old enough , like me, to have come over with Columbus, will member some things that have changed too much to recognize. Like children’s stories.

I’ve heard many complaints about current TV cartoons aimed at kids. One is that they contain too much conflict and violence.

Well, let’s look at the stories we read--or were read to us--as children, often called “fairy tales”. Were they of more sweet and kind content?

How about Hansel and Gretel at the Gingerbread house? Where the witch was roasted to death in her own oven? (Granted, she had planned to roast them, but, well, witches have to eat too.)

Or the wolf who fell down the chimney into the boiling liquid the Little Pigs had  lovingly prepared for him?

Or the jealous queen who sends a woodsman to the forest to kill the princess and, when that fails, poisons her?

In generations earlier than mine, however, the original versions of those stories were even grimmer. A research paper in EssayTown.com mentions tales that included witches being burned alive, wicked brothers being sewn up in sacks and drowned, a wolf having his belly cut open and filled with stones, false brides dragged in barrels studded with nails. (That’ll teach’em.)

Now you’ll notice that the unfortunate characters in these stories who got burned, drowned, mutilated and otherwise dealt with were no angels. In fact they brought those terrible conditions on themselves by their own behaviour. It seems obvious that parents used those tales to scare the hell out of their kids as lessons of what may happen to you if  you screw up too badly.

In trying to explain that two situations are not as similar as they may seem, I might say, “Now that’s a horse of a different colour.” At which one of my grandchildren--and often someone even somewhat older--will look confused and say, “What does that mean?”  I’m amazed to find that he or she has never heard that expression, so familiar to my grandparents, parents, and my own generation. What happened to those old figures of speech?  Well, let’s begin by looking at 10 of them. See how many  you know and then check out their meanings in the last paragraph of this column.

1.skalawag, 2.getting long in the tooth, 3.Adam’s ale, 4.big frog in little puddle, 5.skedaddle, 6.hill of beans,  7.Philadelphia lawyer, 8.travelling on shank’s mare, 9.many a slip twixt cup and lip, 10.looking peaked

Just writing those words down reminds me of listening, when I was a kid, to the conversations of older members of my family. Dad’s family came originally from Minnesota and North Dakota, and my mother’s from Ontario. But they all used in their speech many of the same traditional words and phrases. Some can be traced back more than 300 years, others likely came in during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  How and why did they, almost suddenly in historic years, die out?

It may well be that television and other electronic media have replaced the telling of stories, including the fairy tales mentioned above, along with Mother Goose rhymes. Also many of the old expressions use rural references, and now most younger people in Canada and other Western countries were born and raised in cities. My grandchildren’s generation is likely the first in centuries to have lost those root ingredients of language.

Now, the meanings of the words and phrases listed above.

1.rascal, 2.getting old (age of a horse can be estimated by amount of gum recession), 3.water, 4.easier to seem important in a small group than a large one, 5.get away quickly, 6.description of small worth: “Your help on this job isn’t worth a hill…”,  7.someone smart enough to solve a complex problem, 8.walking, 9.don’t be too sure something will turn out as you expect, 10.looking pale and unwell

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