The Old Coot is losing his vocabulary. Published in the southern tier of ny..

 The Old Coot is losing his vocabulary.

By Merlin Lessler

There are certain words in the English language I can’t use anymore. It’s an old Coot thing. Words like “hop,” as in hop on a bike. I tilt mine at a severe angle, swing my leg so it barely makes it over the seat, straighten the bike back up so I can mount it and pedal away. But first, I feel for a pedal, push it up high, and then off I go, like a newborn colt trying out its legs for the first time. Another word is “dash.” If I applied for a Door-Dash job, they would have to replace the word dash with limp, shuffle and weave to the door.

Equestrian is another word I can’t use, not as it applies to me anyhow. I rode a horse on a trail in Utah at Zion National Park a couple years ago. His name was Frosty. It suited him to a tee. He was chilly, to say the least. He knew I was a hesitant rider and decided to make it my last time in the saddle. He kept trying to bite my leg and paid no attention when I pulled the reins. He bounced me along for more than an hour; I ended up with a nice blister at the bottom of my spine. I was never much of a rider anyhow. A horse I rode when I was a kid, bolted from the group, and galloped back to the barn. I ducked just in time to avoid smashing my head into the door frame. At my daughter Amy’s wedding, I led her on a white horse to an outcropping on a mountain in Colorado. The horse constantly nipped at and pushed me. No more equestrian antics for me.  

 

I can’t say “skip” anymore. Ten years ago, I got it into my head that I’d like to skip; it was something I loved to do when I was a kid. I skipped all over the south side of Binghamton. You can cover a lot of ground, and fast, when you skip. Close to running speeds. Ten years ago, it was still in my vocabulary. I tried it the other day. It wasn’t skipping; it was a jerk, wobble and stumbling kind of thing. Skip, as in skipping, is lost to my vocabulary. As is chin-up, hanging from a bar and pulling yourself up. That’s gone as well. I did 1/4 of one last week. What’s my point? Hang onto your vocabulary as long as you can.

 

The Old Coot looks back. (Published 08/12/2026)

 The Old Coot notices the old dress code.

By Merlin Lessler

Gerald R Smith, the former Broome County Historian and now Executive Director of the Tioga County Historical Society, had a column in the Binghamton Press a few weeks ago. It included a picture of a group of Endicott Johnson Shoe Company workers, circa 1935. The picture captured the images of fifteen workers and one foreman. The foreman was standing next to a rack of leather soles that the workers had carved out of thick, leather slabs.  He wore a white shirt with rolled-up sleeves, a tie and suspenders. It kind of surprised me.

Then, I looked at the workers; even more of a surprise. All 15 were in collared shirts, protected by work aprons; nine of them had on ties; two wore bow ties. One worker wore a derby hat, another wore an old fashion golf cap, sometimes referred to as a news boy cap. This crew was better dressed than most people you see in church today. Even better than some people at wedding receptions who call their dress style, casual chic. I’m sure none of those guys took their shirts to the dry cleaners, nor were they made from permanent press material. You can be sure they were cleaned in a ringer washer, hung out on a clothesline to dry and as you probably guessed, ironed by their wives. That’s the way it was in circa 1935.

My grandfather was a foreman at EJ’s in the early 1900’s. My mother worked in an EJ office in the 1930’s and I worked there in my teens during summer break, pushing around racks just like the one the foreman in Gerald Smith’s article was leaning on. Years later, I acquired three of those oak racks that became available after EJ went out of business. I removed the glue that had layered up over the years and refinished them. They were unique shelves for books, quilts and other vintage items that we collected. The only one left is in my daughter, Amy’s house, holding up quite well after 100 years of service. What’s my point? People were better dressed 100 years ago.

 

 

Photo From Gerald Smith’s column

The Old Coot had phone fun. (Published 08/05/2026 in NY)

 The Old Coot made crank calls.

By Merlin Lessler

I love my cell phone. It makes life easier in so many ways. Even fierce resistors to technology can now be seen scrolling through their devices in public. Ninety-seven per cent of our adult population has a cell phone. It has saved lives and eliminated millions of inconveniences.

But, and there is always a but, we have lost some things in the transition from land lines to cell towers. Like the crank calls kids of my generation made. We’d call strangers and ask them, “Is your refrigerator running?” When they replied that it was, we’d burst into laughter and say, “You better hang up and go catch it.”

If a woman answered, we asked her if she was the lady who did the washing. If she said no, and she always said no, while breaking a gut we’d say, “Why you dirty, filthy thing.”

With cell phones you can’t listen in on a party line like we did in my day, where several households shared the same wire coming down the street. Only one household could use the line at a time. You had to wait your turn, or like we sometimes did, listen in and then break in to claim to have an important call to make or an emergency, and need the line. The only phone snooping we do today is when we hear one side of a conversation from a rude, loudmouth yakking away on his phone in public.

 You can’t slam down your phone when you get mad like you could with an old Bell telephone. If you do, you ‘ll demolish your expensive phone. If your phone battery is dead, or you forget to bring it with you, good luck finding a public phone or someone willing to let you use theirs. Even if you do, you probably won’t know the phone number of the person you want to reach.  You can’t hail a taxi either; you need your phone to catch an Uber. I think the people who miss the landline the most, are the men who sat in a bar in the old days and shouted when the bar phone rang, “I’m not here!” They can’t avoid their wives like that anymore.

You can’t call directory Assistance to get someone’s number anymore. I tried. I got an A/I voice telling me that directory assistance wasn’t available from my location. You also can’t get the satisfaction of making a free long-distance call, which was expensive in the old days, by having the operator place a “person-to-person” call to your house and ask to speak to yourself. When I did it, my mother would say, “Merlin isn’t here.” Then she knew I’d made it to my destination, and it didn’t cost her a dime! I do love my cell phone, but I also miss those things you could do with a land line. I’m sure you can think of many others.

The Old Coot is positive? Maybe? (Published 07/27/26)

 The Old Coot is Positive, Almost, Maybe, Sort of!  

By Merlin Lessler.

 

I’m positive,” is something we say when we’re young, a time when our memories are firing on all eight cylinders. As we get older and discover we are sometimes wrong, it gets modified to, I’m almost positive.  With each new decade, our statements lose their assurance. I’m almost positive evolves to, I’m fairly positive, and then to I’m somewhat sure. By the time we apply for Social Security, all bets are off; we qualify every statement, with things like: “Or so I’ve been told” – “At least that’s what I’ve been led to believe” – “According to so-and-so.”

 

Every time we are corrected, it decreases our use of positive statements, transitioning us to where we aren’t sure of anything. Our language proves it: “I think his name is Bill.” – “I’ve heard the Murphys and the Johnsons are back from Florida.” – “I guess that we turn the clocks ahead this weekend.” We don’t know anything!

 

Then, a magical thing happens. All of a sudden, we’re positive again. It’s not that we’ve gotten any smarter, just the opposite. We know less than we’ve ever known. It’s just that we’ve moved into our 80’s. It’s a wonderful time of life. We don’t care what other people think. It doesn’t matter that we are corrected when we say that Owego celebrated its bicentennial in 1985 instead of 1987. Or, when we are talking to Daphne and call her Darcy. We got the first letter of her name right and that’s good enough. Old phrases come back into our vocabulary: “I’m positive!” – “I’d bet my life on it!” – “There is no question about it!”

 

People who stop me on the street and ask for directions get a full dose of my know-it-all, cocky attitude. It doesn’t matter where they want to go. I give all of them the same instructions. I send them to the high school. That’s where most strangers want to go anyhow. With great assurance and positivity I tell them to turn left on George Street and then right when they come to the statue of an Indian on a horse, even though the statue was removed a few years ago.