What's in a catchphrase?

In the spring of 1984 there was a new television commercial for one of those three or four fast food chains that compete savagely and endlessly, like religious factions in a holy war, for the favour of teenagers who seem to survive mainly on hamburgers, French fries and gaseous soft drinks.

This short – I think only 30 second – ad was an audacious exercise in a new type of TV commercial in this country which doesn't cry up its own product so much as cry down the product of its competitors. Very often this type of ad names the chief competitor and sneers at its claims – a technique that a dozen years ago would have appeared likely to offer grounds for a libel suit.

Well, in this particular ad you saw two women looking down at a very meagre hamburger and, at their side, a little old lady with a craggy face. You sensed at once from her scowl that she was the representative of the chain that was making the ad. She was, apart from her angry carbuncle of a face, tiny. In life, only four feet ten, so all we saw of her above the counter was her bobbing, angry face. She'd obviously had enough of the pitiful object her friends had been served and she suddenly barked at them, 'But where's the beef? Where's the beef?'

It touched the hearts of those millions of us who, when eating out, very rarely come on the genuine article, a fat patty of chopped sirloin or fillet, but more often a sliver of a patty that could be mistaken for a coaster to rest your drink on and composed usually of pounded cereal and other foreign bodies, impregnated with a shred of meat. The line, 'Where's the beef?' must have echoed in a thousand lunch counters and roadside restaurants.

It suddenly, however, became a national idiom. When Mr Walter Mondale, in a televised debate with Mr Gary Hart, another contender for the Democratic nomination, listened awhile to Mr Hart's visionary and rather vague blueprint for running the country – Mr Hart's rhetoric was always a little short on substance – Mr Mondale heard him out but then turned to him and said, 'Yes, but where's the beef?'. It brought the house down and the director of the hamburger commercial said later, 'If Walter Mondale could have said the line like Clara, he'd have been our president'.

Clara was Clara Peller, a child immigrant from Russia and, for most of her life, a manicurist who, in her sixties, got into television commercials as a non-speaking, practically invisible, extra. But in 1984, when she was 83, her head appeared above that lunch counter and she barked out her famous line. She died in Chicago the other day at the age of 86 and achieved the dignity of a two-column obituary in the New York Times. A clip of her ad and another of Mondale's adoption of it was shown on all the national networks.

Clara Peller's famous three words are a reminder that the television ad is only the latest source of American popular idiom. I can now think back to a dozen or more catchphrases in the past ten years or so that came out of TV commercials and, since millions of people heard them, passed into the language for the time being. American slang, especially, has traditionally sprung from what is most characteristic in the experience of people doing different jobs in different climates. From the timber workers in the north west, we got 'on the skids' which were planks of saplings on which the logs can be rolled down the river. The cowboys gave many expressions to the language and one of them, I should guess the last of them, remained into my own time.

I remember when I first came to Yale, if you asked somebody to do a favour which might be troublesome, he'd say, 'No trouble! It's a cinch'. This came from the cattlemen in Texas who, a century ago, rounded up their yearling calves for the long trail to the feed lots in the lust pastures of the Midwest where they would be fattened up for you and me. When the whole company, the outfit, was ready for the journey north, the cowboys strapped up the belt around the girth of their horses, the saddle girth, and were on their way. In Spanish – and remember, the south-west had once been New Spain – in Spanish, a saddle girth is a cincha, so 'it's a cinch' came to mean 'ready to go' and then, by extension, as we'd now say, 'No problem!'.

However, the word is long gone and I doubt that any American under 40 has ever heard it because once an idiom no longer calls up a picture of the condition that bred it, it dies and the cowboy and the cattle kingdom and all their customs and talk are dead and gone. Hence, young people are the first to drop their parents' slang and catchphrases because they don't recall the life that spawned them.

I'm not sure whether this is so true in older countries. There must still be old gentlemen in England who talk about somebody being hoist by his own petard, but I'm pretty sure that few of them get a mental picture of what's meant by the phrase and, fewer still, who know the very rude origin of the word 'pétard' from the French. Even young people in England I've heard say they were on tenterhooks, but I'll bet only young Lancashire men or Yorkshiremen with fathers or grandfathers who were in the mills know what a tenterhook is and why it produces tension.

In my early time here, the Prohibition gangsters of the early Thirties splattered the language with phrases that through the early sound movies passed over to England and were used, often with unconscious comical effect, even by respectable officers of the BBC. Staff members who were sacked were said to have been 'taken for a ride' or 'bumped off'. Somebody getting quickly out of an awkward situation decided to 'take it on the lam'. But, certainly, what you might call the classical language of the gangsters has passed away with the gangsters of the Chicago vintage.

You'll notice I don't say with THE gangsters. They're still with us, but today they're not crude and flashy. They dress austerely like the conservative businessmen they are. Their sons have, quite possibly, gone to Princeton or Columbia. They don't merely eat at fashionable places, they quite likely own them. Their offices are not in suburban warehouses, they're in Wall Street. They run such diverse and essential enterprises as, in some cities, the building industry, stevedores, longshoremen's unions, from Maine to New Orleans. They have a hand in such seemingly innocent fronts as ski resorts and pizza parlours which have proved to be wonderful cover-ups for drug sales.

Only the sleazier heirs of the old Capone days specialise in the gambling and prostitution rackets of Las Vegas and Atlantic City. For the others, whatever slang they generate is indistinguishable from the daily jargon of takeovers and insider trading.

Prison slang has always been a very fertile source of the American vernacular and all of us use, quite innocently, many of the jailbirds' expressions, the original meaning of which the most brazen of us would blush to learn. Well, we won't go into that.

New York city itself added new words to the language in the beginning because the Dutch had owned the place before the English, and such words as the stoop of a house have stayed with us, cruller, as a kind of cake, and every child who learns to say 'foyst' and pronounces turmoil as 'toimoil', that Brooklyn is an English corruption of Breukelen.

But the main source of new entries into New York English was the fact that in the past hundred years, this city has been the port of entry for immigrants from many countries of Europe and because about half, at least, of all the Jews who arrived here, settled here, many Yiddish words passed into everybody's slang.

I hadn't been hear a month before I knew what a schlemiel was and when playing cards learned to watch out for kibitzers. The cloak and suit business, alone, produced catchphrases that are still with us. The American novelist Jerome Weidman, the Dickens of the Lower East Side, reflected his early experience in the business through the titles of several of his novels, 'The Price is Right', 'What's In It for Me?', 'I Can Get It for you Wholesale'.

Coming up to today, I was going to say that since the administration was taken over by marines and navy men – but of course that would be an outrageous exaggeration – however, in the recent testimony before the Iran-Contra committees, we kept hearing naval expressions from three ex-marines. Secretary Shultz, former chief of staff Don Reagan, not to mention the third man, what's his name, Colonel North.

At one point, Mr Shultz differed with Admiral Poindexter about the meaning of the phrase 'stood down'. The admiral had said that there came a time when the Iran arms deal was 'stood down' by which he implied it had been put, for the time being, on the shelf. Mr Shultz said that when he was told it was stood down, he assumed it had been abandoned. Why, he was asked, the difference in understanding? Because, he said, I'm a marine, not a navy man.

Out of those hearings there has come an old phrase which will forever be attached to what the president now calls the Iran-Contra mess – the buck, comes from poker playing. It was a marker, often a silver dollar – it's a buck – to show who had the next deal and it could be passed by someone who didn't want responsibility of dealing to the man on his left. Hence, passing the buck.

President Truman made the word immortal when he made it clear that the president alone is responsible for his administration. 'The buck,' he said, 'stops here.'

In this administration and in its mess, we had come to believe that the buck stopped with Admiral Poindexter. 'Not so,' said Mr Reagan on Wednesday, 'It stops with the president.' It will send a huge sigh of relief throughout the country after nine months of doubt, we now know that the president is the man in charge and that he is responsible for whatever happens, as the old marines kept saying, 'on his watch'.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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