Heavens to Betsy, has it been four days already?

Thank you all very much for your contributions to last week's interactive Friday Five. As it's now Tuesday, it's as good a time as any to post a roundup, don't you think? I asked for your favorite words or phrases that have long been forgotten in the lexicon--words we haven't heard since Jimmy Stewart uttered them in a talkie that our grandparents saw on their first date. In case you didn't have the patience to wade through the comments, here's what the lot of you came up with.

• Willy-nilly
• In the family way
• Setting up housekeeping
• Breaking bread
• Gay (as in happy, you fool, as in "we'll have a gay ol' time")
• I doth protest
• Wanna flap?
• The Middle West (where Fitzgerald knows we Minnesotans live)
• Woe is me
• Dumb dora
• The bee's knees
• Dagnabbit
• Heavens to Betsy
• Knickerbocker
• Pitching woo
• Hold your horses
• Chap
• Don't take any wooden nickels
• What a fat pig that William Howard Taft is (you're right, Aaron; that never gets old)
• Insolent
• Reticent
• Expectorate (and micturate)
• The depths of despair (thank you, Cookie, and Anne of Green Gables)
• Sot (so much better and more high-brow than "drunken fool")
• Egad
• Bee in her bonnet
• Lollygagger
  

Not to play favorites, of course, as you all had fine things to say, but I think I'm particularly fond of dagnabbit, ol' chap, the bee's knees, pitching woo, and lollygag. Oh, and "heavens to Betsy," which I'll admit I actually added myself. I'd also like to add "davenport" to the list, because you know what? Sometimes "sofa" or "couch" just doesn't suffice.

Also, I cannot believe that Erikka (at comment #33) was the first person to ask just what on earth this list had to do with a boy. The fact is there is a boy on an increasingly lame personals site who mentioned a penchant for obscure words and phrases that were last fashionable in the 1920s, and I thought perhaps I might impress him with just the right long-forgotten phrase. After researching the definition of "pitching woo," however, I didn't really have the nerve to use it as the subject of an email. Also, it turns out that this perfect-for-me-on-paper boy might actually be a bit of a tool. I mentioned that my shoes were sensible enough to be preferred by librarians the world over, but I never said I was a librarian. Still, he followed up with, "So you're an honest-to-goodness librarian? Public or research?" Um, NO. I am not a librarian. Never claimed to be, in fact. But since you're calling up all sorts of sexy librarian fantasies right now, there's really no winning you back from that, is there?

The fading optimist in me--the part of me that still wants to believe that psychic was right when she said 2008 would be my year--would like to think there's still some great story in the works here. Years from now, we'll be telling our "how we met" story to friends or grandchildren...

Me: I read his profile and then posted one of my own just so I could have a way to contact him.
Him: Oh, you did not. You were all over the Internet, weren't you?
Me: No. In fact, I was not. Not online really anywhere at the time.
Him: Except that blog of yours, which you did not tell me about for months.
Me: Oh. Right. Except for that, of course.
Him: And Friendster, which for some reason you still had a profile on, even though you eschewed MySpace and Facebook.
Me: Right. And that. I swear I almost never logged on.
Him: [eye roll]
Me: I didn't! Anyway, so, I added him to my "Hotlist," in the hopes that he would see my interest and step up.
Him: I was busy! I had work!
Me: Then why were you online?
Him: ...
Me: And I finally broke down and emailed him, with a cute little list of all the commonalities we had.
Him: It was cute. I'll give you that.
Me: But you still didn't take the bait. You thought I was a librarian. You didn't even READ my profile, did you?? Admit it. You had written me off.
Him: I hadn't met you yet! I had no idea of all your charms!

Um, yeah. And... scene. Clearly I've got a bit too much time on my hands. I'll keep you posted if any of this pans out, of course. At the moment, I'm pretty much feeling like my dating life is just an example of bad, bad karma of some sort. Strangely, though, I'm not sure if I'm creating the bad karma or paying for it. Time will tell, I guess.