THE DAUGHTER WAS WALKING TOWARDS the back gate when I called out, ‘Cheerio.’ I swear it just slipped out. Not sure where it was stored, as it’s not my usual valediction. I’m more likely to say ‘see ya’ (with or without a ‘later’), ‘ciao’ or, increasingly, simply ‘later’ all on its own. But cheerio bubbled up from somewhere, broke the surface and popped out. The same thing happens occasionally with ‘fair dinkum’ when I’m bowled over in a moment of incredulity, but that’s another story. I’m starting to think we store these oddballs on dusty shelves in the filing cabinet of the mind and they pop out when our guard is lowered. I imagine a cognitive scientist or a neurolinguist would have a more technical explanation.
She was nearly out the back gate, the daughter, when the cheerio must’ve registered. She swung around, looked at me in disbelief—a look that any parent of a teenager will know and attest to; it’s the kind of look that is an active ageing agent— and said, without expecting an answer, ‘Cheery WHAT?’
So, this led me to wonder when exactly it was that we stopped saying cheerio. Around the same time we stopped saying toodle-loo, (h)oo-roo, see you later alligator/in a while crocodile, if you can’t be good, be careful, toodle-pip. You still hear some of these expressions, but you’re more likely to encounter them in Anglo-dominated regional Australia than in multicultural urban centres. And even while cheerio has faded, the word still has rather happy associations. That may be why it was given as a name to a breakfast cereal, or to those party cocktail frankfurts that children, and lurking parents, seem to love, especially when bathed in tomato sauce.
I’m inclined to wager that cheerio started to vanish around the time we stopped whistling. In fact, I’d warrant that cheerio and whistling form a natural coupling. Separately and together, they bespeak a different time—a more leisurely paced existence with fewer activities scheduled into less jam-packed days. Nowadays whistling is far more functional—it’ll get your dog’s attention, it might hail a taxi when you need one—but of course that kind of whistle is not the whistling that goes with cheerio, not by a long shot. Carpenters used to whistle on a construction site—and not only at a passing short skirt. It was the casual whistle that accompanied concentrated focus. I have a plumber who whistles, but he’s in his sixties and when he retires I don’t expect to hear much whistling again. I did notice that canary-yellow free postcard that you see about the place. It is printed in big block black letters, as befitting a noticeboard sign, and says: CHEERFUL WHISTLING PERMITTED HERE.
The irony, of course, is that if a workplace requires a sign to grant licence to whistle, it’s very unlikely to have employees in the mood for whistling. The ‘permitted here’ is a dead giveaway. In the past, whistling, like being of good cheer, didn’t require a permit. You just whistled whenever you wanted. Roofers were particularly adept at it—I once had the thought that they whistled so you’d know what part of the roof they were on at any particular time. Though why you would need to know that, I have no idea.
But it’s not only tradesmen. Whistling was something you did while doing something else. Like some repetitive task (sweeping the floor, stamping envelopes) or while you walked idly along, taking maximum pleasure in your carpe diem kind of day. That time has passed: these days hardly anyone walks idly along. In fact it may even be something you could be arrested for. You only walk in a goal-targeted kind of way. And it’s hard to whistle when you’re so focused. They don’t collocate.
The closest we come to ‘whistling’ these days is ‘whistle-blowing’, a term that has a wholly different hue and tone. In fact, that kind of whistle—the umpire’s or referee’s, sounded for the purpose of attracting attention or asserting authority, or both—is altogether different from the idle whistle à la Snow White’s Seven Dwarves.
Words like ‘cheerio’ and the act of whistling provide a window on another time. ‘Chew the fat’ is another expression that has gone the direction of the hospice, partly because both chewing and fat, let alone doing one to the other, are not favoured thoughts in our post-Kentucky Fried Chicken zeitgeist. The other reason, of course, is that meal times, like other times, are hurried events (the Slow Food movement notwithstanding), and there’s hardly time to chew your thin, lean Thai-style beef let alone engage in talk. Ask for the bill before you have cleaned your plate and there’s a chance you’ll be out of there and back at the office in record time.
Your old fat-chewing, nattering chinwag was a relaxed event, with topics undetermined though roughly predictable, apparently unstructured, with an equitable sharing of the available discourse space between speaker and listener. Long pauses, comfortable spaces where mull time could hover and nourish (akin, in a weird way, to those boxing managers who attend, in roped corners, to their bloodied investments in the brief, concussed interludes between rounds). Fewer time-constraints, less all-round Filofax pressure. Perhaps it was the presence of fat in the mouth—there for the ongoing chewing, in the bovine masticatory sense—which made the act of talking less important than the actual comforting fact of company shared. As for ‘company’, sociologists claim that with each passing year we are even less likely to know our neighbours’ names, let alone wish to borrow a cup of sugar or share a natter on the verandah. Once, the entire street, if not the village, kept an eye out for whoever’s kids might be playing outside. Today you keep away from other people’s children, and you keep yours away from them. Overall, it’s no big surprise that with the acceleration of time, the breakdown of community and the plethora of nutritional information, ‘chewing the fat’ has become an odd little phrase, eccentric in the way of bow ties and trouser braces.
And so it is that ‘chew the fat’ is now comfortably housed in the Hospice of Fading Words where, ironically, it can indulge reflexively in its own semantics and spend the best part of each day shooting the breeze, as it were, on the ward’s verandah with other like-minded fading oddballs—indeed idiomatic siblings—like ‘chinwag’ and ‘natter’, who would all get on like a house on fire.
‘Cheerio’ belongs there, too, because it’s the kind of valediction that would likely end a daily natter. In its expanded form, be of good cheer, it means to put on a happy face. It comes to us from the Greek kara, for face, via the Latin cara and Old French chiere. Being of good face, no doubt, implied that everything would be well in your life, or at least well enough for you to have a cheerful face. By Middle English, the meaning of ‘cheer’ had extended metaphorically to mean mood, demeanour or otherwise invisible mental condition as reflected in the face. Thus around 1500 it was no oxymoron to be in ‘a dreerye cheere’, whereas today, combining the two might win you a diagnosis of bipolar.
By the start of the 15th century, ‘cheer’ had a positive meaning only, so if you wanted to be dreary you’d have to make separate arrangements. Much later, under the influence of nautical slang, cheer took on a plural –s and morphed into an exclamatory ‘cheers!’, emerging as a shout of encouragement or a celebratory toast. In fact, today, depending which variety of English you speak, you can make ‘cheers!’ sing a whole lot harder for its supper—as a toast, a thank you, a goodbye or merely an acknowledgement of another’s existence.