"Good old days"

[Jonathan Lighter]

For the Greeks, the Golden Age (and the Silver and the Heroic) was so far in the past that they were unlikely to have genuine nostalgia for it or to have referred to it much in ordinary conversation.  (I've no evidence for this idea, of course.) "The good old days" in English often implies that the speaker remembers them personally; no ancient Greek or Roman could make that claim.

During the Dark - oops, I mean "Early Middle" - Ages, life changed so little from generation to generation (except for plagues and invasions) that any cultural nostalgia would have seemed decidedly eccentric.

Neoclassicism  could have exerted some influence, but I'd think it would have taken at least a couple of generations to "trickle down."

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 6:41 PM, Jonathan Lighter wrote:

> ...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.

here's the crucial question.

the Golden Age idea was a commonplace in classical times. when did it
ebb away, and what brought it back?

arnold, really really not a cultural historian

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