'That's highly significant': The joy of old media and family shorthand

Classic TV AND classic rock? Welcome back to the age of jive.

It was a quiet moment in the church pew on Sunday. The pastor had just started his homily, a meditation on Christ the Good Shepherd, one that involved a previous post-Easter Sunday at home, after Mass, listening to classical music. What popped on but Bach’s “Sheep May Safely Graze.” Our pastor positively waxed about feeling transformed with the aura of a job well done. And then my wife leans over and whispers, “Ah, Bach.”

If you aren’t one of the many “MASH” fanatics in my life, you might not know the reference to a first-season episode, when company clerk and Iowa naif Radar O’Reilly is trying to woo a cultured nurse (and officer, to boot). And the denziens of the Swamp are helping him to navigate the art of conversation with a well-read person of culture with lines like “That’s highly significant,” “I’m partial to the fugue” and the all-purpose reset one gets from a well-timed “Ah, Bach.”

Even if you aren’t a “MASH” fanatic, you are aware it went off the air (and I mean, the air) in 1983, in the one piece of episodic television that stands out among Super Bowls in any list of most-watched broadcast TV events. So first season, that’s 1973, a 51-year-old piece of TV still bantied around in our couplehood shorthand.

And it was so well-timed, I accused her of saying it just to keep me from doing it. Of course, was the answer back.

Mere hours earlier, before going to bed Saturday night, my wife had received a call from our oldest son, an 18-year-old, about some joke told on a TV show they love, “Modern Family.” And how he misapplied it to his life, in some manner that sent him cackling still as he tried to recount it over a cellphone and in a fashion that we couldn’t tell if he was hurt or howling with laughter.

He will probably be the only child in our family to wax poetic about a piece of televison. Our younger boys are partial to YouTube, and while they might tell us about something that reminds them of “Modern Family” or “The Big Bang Theory,” it would be in the course of dinner conversation, not a late-night phone call or church-pew whisper.

This is the language of any tribe, inside jokes and fond memories that cut to the quick of a conversation like Aesop’s Fables did in times of old. We all have it. We have several actually, moving from friends, family, work colleagues, classmates, roommates and any peer group we can assemble. Like young William Costigan Jr. in “The Departed,” we move from white-curtain Irish tones to the shouts of the streets of Southie. And, we might even have different accents, like we’re different people, to pick up Mark Wahlberg’s accusation in “The Departed.”

Code-switching is what some call that now, even giving that name to an NPR podcast, in the context of race. But it goes so much wider, which was put on display for me again after spending a week of spring break with those young boys, surviving a week of travel on a music diet equally divided between classic rock, current country and a downloaded playlist of songs they like, mostly curated by their mom, through movies, TV shows and more. But they are adding to it, thanks to steady exposure to a Amazon Dot Echo device and access to its music subscription service. I dare not calling it pop, because that connotation for the Monolithic Media age gone by doesn’t stand up.

That’s something we learned by watching the Billy Joel special on CBS after coming home from our spring break travels. Most of those classics were new songs to them. Which falls on me a bit, with my own media tastes turning to classical and jazz as of late, beacons of calm amid the news tumult of our Ever-Online Age of today. When “My Life” came on, I wondered if I had heard it at the age that my youngest is now. He’s 9. It came out in 1978, when I was 5. By the time I was his age, in the era of AM Radio Still Playing Music, let alone as the intro to “Bosom Buddies,” even sheltered-not-hip young me had probably heard it hundreds of times. Sadly, not my boy.

So enjoy that family lingua franca while it lasts. They’ll soon be rolling their eyes at me and their mom even more as they become media consumers. Whenever that is, it’ll be highly significant, even as I sit home off in The Future (still watching “MASH”). Welcome to the club.