"Good old days"

[Jonathan Lighter]

I doubt that education, euphuism, or any other obvious factor is responsible. Both EEBO and ECCO (Eighteenth Century Collections Online) contain tens of thousands of texts by authors who, taken together, had a vast experience of life. The searchable texts range from the King James Version to dramas and forgotten epics to translations of the classics to sermons and practical treatises on every imaginable subject, to dictionaries, to songbooks, jestbooks, broadsides and the like.  While virtually all the writers were by definition far better educated than the average person, they also had a correspondingly high interest (and a varying ability) in using language effectively. Had an idiom like "the good old days" been in widespread use,  it can hardly be that all of these writers would have found a way to avoid using it.

The simplest explanation may be that my search for possibly synonymous phrases was insufficiently imaginative; maybe I just didn't hit upon the appropriate idiom.

Someone with extensive familiarity with Early Modern English idioms should repeat the experiment.

If a phrase equivalent to "the good old days" is findable in pre-1707 writings, it would have to be attested a fair number of times in the corpus for it to be considered idiomatically correspondent.  That is, even if Malory could be shown to have written "the merrie daies of old," the phrase would be unlikely to have been a familiar English idiom without the discovery of further examples.

It may be a little thing in the "history of ideas,"  but it must be of some cultural significance that for a number of generations we've had a universally used phrase to indicate  we think the past was better, whereas Shakespeare and Milton seemingly had not.

JL

"Arnold M. Zwicky" <zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU> wrote:
---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: "Arnold M. Zwicky"
Subject: Re: "Good old days"
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On Oct 6, 2004, at 4:11 PM, Jonathan Lighter asks:

> ...Why the apparent development of nostalgia around 1700? Or is the
> problem with EEBO?

one very tentative hypothesis: the appearance of neo-classicism in
english literature? we're talking almost entirely about "elevated"
authors here, aren't we?

arnold

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