My Billings Gazette

This article, by author Ralph Keyes, has been bandied about in journalism circles for the past few days. Keyes' point, in a nutshell: Our insistence on dated pop-culture references is driving away young readers.

Keyes writes:

Retrotalk is ubiquitous among journalists of a certain age. By using it they set themselves apart from those born in the last three or four decades. On "Meet the Press," New York Times columnist David Brooks said about Hillary Clinton, “In the first debate she’s Emily Post, now she’s Howard Beale,” referring to the late etiquette maven and the angry protagonist of the 1976 movie "Network." In a recent column Brooks wrote, “And not to get Rod McKuen on you or anything …” Say what? Inquiring younger minds want to know.

Now, I hate to be a nattering nabob of negativism (a phrase coined used by Vice President Spiro Agnew in 1970, which predates my memory), but Keyes is flat wrong unless he includes two important adjectives to his proposed reining-in: "lazy" and "inappropriate." If that were the crux of Keyes' fight, I would stand with him. Few things come across as weakly as a poorly employed pop-culture reference.

Otherwise, I suspect that he isn't being intellectually honest about how these references foment and perpetuate. Kids who never saw "Happy Days" during its heyday nonetheless use a phrase inspired by the show, "jump the shark" -- or, at least, they did until the phrase itself jumped the shark.

A friend of mine, age 39, signs off on Facebook every night with "Goodnight, Gracie." The program that made it famous, "The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show," went off the air 12 years before he was born.

These gems live on because they're passed down, from generation to generation, whether it's from parent to child or through the wonder of syndicated television. You didn't have to be alive during the original run of "Gilligan's Island" or "Leave it to Beaver" to get the references -- those shows are playing, somewhere, every day. In fact, I daresay that the greater risk lies in making reference to current pop culture, when we don't have the benefit of the years to know whether something is enduring or just a passing fad.

Wisteria Lane is now. Mayberry, as noted by one commenter, is eternal.