Every January 1, the calendar rolls over to a new year. For more than a century, cartoonists have used the image of a bearded old man for the old year and a baby for the new year. We can look forward to the new year with anticipation or dread. We can view the old year as a good year or a rotten year best forgotten. Except we can’t really forget. The English language also keeps memory of the old and obsolete. We constantly use popular phrases long after the conditions that cause them have become obsolete. Some recall very old technology and others more recent. But by this time, we have to appeal to history to know where they came from.

Let’s all gather in the kitchen. It may be everyone’s favorite room in the house, and many of the popular phrases we hear all the time have some connection with it. Everything but the kitchen sink This phrase refers to a very large number of things: nearly everything imaginable and probably much more than necessary. The Syracuse Herald apparently published the first instance of it in 1918. Actually, the Jefferson National Democratused the phrase “everything but the kitchen stove” in 1894. The whole idea probably originated sometime earlier. The Herald’s version may have been influenced by the popular Sears catalog.