Off the Front Page and Off the Back

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Jared calling from Kaiser, Oregon.

Hi, Jared. Welcome to the show.

What’s up?

Thanks very much. It’s great to be on with you guys.

My question came by something I hadn’t even thought about for quite a few years, but the show a few weeks ago about the funny papers was what kind of unlocked the memory.

I’m in my 40s now, and a few years ago I just happened to be at a store with my dad, and we ran into this mutual friend.

We probably hadn’t seen this person in 20 or more years.

And when he asked how we were doing, my dad responded with this phrase where he said, well, I’m staying off the front page and I’m staying off the back page.

And I remember, I seem to remember exchanging a look with our friend as if to kind of say, what?

And I have a pretty good idea what he meant, but it was one of those things that just kind of faded into my memory.

And like I said, hadn’t even thought about it again until that show from a few weeks ago.

But I immediately knew who to ask about the possible origin of that phrase.

What did you take it to mean?

Well, I kind of figured the front page would be probably good headlines and the back page would maybe mean bad headlines like obituaries or crime reports or something like that.

I don’t know.

So your assumption was that he was talking about the front page of a newspaper in the back page then?

Yes. Yeah, that was what I was assuming.

And so basically he was saying, I’m fine, I’m staying out of trouble.

Nothing too terribly successful and nothing too troublesome, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, that makes sense.

I’m not aware of that specific phrase being ensconced in the language, but as you said, I think it makes sense.

You know, I remember growing up with the expression that a proper lady should only ever have her name in the newspaper two times in her life when she was born and when she died.

You know, just, you know, don’t stand out too much in one respect or the other.

And so.

I heard that it’s three times.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Sometimes when you get married.

When announcing their birth, marriage or death.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I’ve seen it that way as well.

Yes, staying off the back pages. In newspapers, as you suggested, often the back page, at least of the front section, will contain obituaries. Sometimes they contain crime reports. And I’m thinking, too, about tabloids. Sometimes they have sensational stories about athletes on the back, you know, athletes who are getting into trouble, something like that.

Okay.

So it could be that.

But Grant, I’m not aware of that specific phrase, although it makes perfect sense.

No, I’m not either.

But it’s interesting.

I wonder the further we get from paper newspapers being an everyday thing, if it will make less and less sense.

50 years from now, it’ll be hard to find a paper newspaper.

Yeah, it’ll be sort of like roll down the window.

Will this just be another archaism?

I think it’s a version of what Martha was mentioning about, you know, a lady or a gentleman should not appear in the newspaper, you know.

And it’s one of the reasons, by the way, that in older newspapers, say in the 1800s, you’ll often find people writing letters to the editor under pseudonyms because they just didn’t want their name in the paper.

They didn’t want the publicity one way or the other, huh?

Right, right.

Even if what they were saying was fairly innocuous, like they were writing for the gardening column.

Jared, I think you suggested an interesting angle to it, which is that when you first mentioned staying off the front pages, I was thinking about staying off the front pages because you’re not getting into trouble.

It’s, you know, they say of local news, if it bleeds, it leads.

And you’re not getting into trouble.

But you also suggested that it may have to do with just not standing out too much.

Yeah, kind of to demur any sort of notoriety of any kind, you know, not taking a huge amount of credit or huge amounts of blame, I guess.

-huh.

So I’m staying off the front page and staying off the back page.

I like it.

Yeah.

Not a tall poppy.

Yes.

No, and I know I’ve never heard it before since.

Well, they’ve got to start somewhere, these expressions, don’t they?

They sure do.

Jared, thank you for your call.

We appreciate it.

Thank you so much.

I love the show.

Yeah, thank you very much.

Thanks, Jerry.

Thanks for listening.

Bye-bye.

Take care.

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