Five, Ten and Forgotten

As my biography notes, I spent a somewhat brief part of my life performing the operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan, if not for a living, at least for a few bucks here and there.  So at least for a good number of years I was very familiar with those pieces, both the libretti of Gilbert, and the music of his teammate Mr. Sullivan.

Gilbert's words and Sullivan's notes, so well-paired in actuality, were always a point of contention between the two of them.  Although they certainly respected each other's talents, it had previously been the historic reality in opera that the libretto was simply a canvas upon which the "true" artist, the composer, was able to set his music.

Gilbert and Sullivan's works were certainly the groundbreaking exception.  W. S. Gilbert was a brilliant man, of great talent and skill in the use of the English language.  Arthur Sullivan forever felt that his music was simply regarded as less important and did not take to that so kindly.  Eventually they quarreled enough so that some of their latest works were simply not of the quality -- and popularity -- of their earlier material.

But I suppose I digress, a lot.

I only brought them up because the words in Gilbert's dialogue and song lyrics were written in the era from the 1870s through the 1890s, and they're a reference point.  I have, for example, performed in 75 productions of the various operettas, and there are still, or were until looking them up, words and phrases that would give me pause, to where I had to look up what they actually meant.

Gilbert did some of that intentionally, sometimes to force a rhyme, and sometimes to reflect what a character in that area might have actually said.  The Yeomen of the Guard, for example, takes place a in a setting a few hundred years earlier than its initial performance in 1888.  Gilbert was, of course, a lawyer and a very well-read Victorian man, and knew his English quite well, at a time when it was an admired trait to use it.

There are, in fact, books on their operettas, which print the libretto replete with notes in the margins describing the actual meaning of unfamiliar words and phrases, and most pages are truly full of the marginal notes.

All the above flashed by as I was listening to a Christmas music satellite-radio station in my car, and the song "It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas" went by in one of its 4,344 recorded iterations.  Mel Torme, I think, was velvetly fogging the line, "Take a look in the five-and-ten, glistening once again ..."

It occurred to me that I had certainly been in a small town five-and-ten many times in my youth (that's a "five and ten-cent store" for the Russians enjoying this piece, by the way, who may have gotten this far).  Many, many times.  God knows that I didn't need to have explained to me what a "five-and-ten" is.

But my imaginary great-grandchildren would likely have no better idea of what a "five and ten" is than they would a phone book or a typewriter or a VHS videotape.  And I got thinking that in, say 50 years, while people will certainly be singing that song (It is, after all, a classic, a catchy tune and a classically-harmonized melody), a great percentage of those listening will have to look up on the 2066 version of Al Gore's Amazing Internet what the reference to a "five and ten" means.

I thought of Gilbert, of course, because I was performing his words 60 years after his death, and still kept looking his words up as long as I was singing them.  We still hear "I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General" in all sorts of settings, and if you can get through it without having to ask what "mamelon" or "ravelin" may be, or a Chassepôt rifle (no fair saying, "oh, yeah, that's a rifle"), or a "commissariat", then you're probably 114 years old.

The language evolves over time, well, duh.  I don't think that we'll need to remember telephone books, since it will always be a joke for short people and kids to have to sit on one, probably long after the last of them has been printed and thrown away, or in the Smithsonian.  And I don't have any romanticized notion that there should always be a town square five-and-ten (and certainly not that there should always be its current successor, the "dollar store").

But it has been interesting to listen, this season, to Christmas songs the past few days.  Christmas songs, after all, are brought back for a few weeks each year and therefore survive far longer than whatever is being "sung" these days by the usual assortment of pop tarts, to be quickly forgotten.

As each Christmas comes around, a few more of those little phrases will jog the minds of people like me, wondering if fifty years hence, we will hear "as the shoppers run home with their treasures" and ask what that meant, given that Christmas presents will have only been ordered online for decades.

Back to work.

Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
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