The Language of the Flipside

Richard Martini https://linktr.ee/richardmartini

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5 min read

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Jun 24, 2023

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Towards a new flipside language.

In the headlines every day, we hear or see the terms “So and so dead at age..” “So and so has died” or people refer to their loved ones as “Lost” or the “tragic loss” or “dead, died…” — I grew up with the term “Kicked the bucket.” An old midwestern term, it was the “last thing someone did before departing God’s green earth.”

In the movie “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World” the film opens with a fellow driving recklessly through the desert, then he drives off a cliff. All the cast members run down the hill to see if the guy’s alive. (Jimmy Durante). With his last breath, he reveals that he’s buried a fortune “under the sign of the X” in Santa Monica, and then promptly kicks a bucket that magically appears next to his foot.

So the audience knows he’s gone. He’s “kicked the bucket.”