Easterine Kire
If you were around in the seventies, you would have used the word ‘Phries!’ more than once. It was thought up by three young teenagers a few days before Christmas 1974. Today, one of them is a surgeon and the proprietor of a big hospital, one is a government official and the third, a successful businessman. The boys started out inventing a word to see how far they could make it travel as a greeting. They came up with the word Phries! and greeted each other with it, loudly, so others would hear. They greeted their friends who laughed but liked it. It caught on quickly as new words usually do among the young, and soon more than ten people were using it. The church youth groups were meeting round about that time. The members were teenagers for the most. It was in the church youth groups that Phries! quickly became a password, and a substitute for formal greetings. An icebreaker. A code that gave you social access to the inner groups.
That year we were excitedly preparing to celebrate Christmas with the church group for the first time. The use of Phries! kept growing. Hesitantly, at first, and then with growing confidence. It was always met with laughter. The boys then thought it would be a great achievement to get more people to use it, in particular, grown-ups. It began with resistance. Their mothers scolded them, and told them to stop indulging in nonsensical stuff like that, and try to be more mature.
‘It’s so silly!’ ‘It is meaningless’ and ‘it’s dumb!’ – these were some of the oppositions raised against the new word. But the boys persisted and at the end of two weeks they reported success because half the people in their colony were using it. It spread to youngsters in other churches, and became more and more popular amongst town dwellers. Someone even remarked how convenient it was that when you were driving a vehicle, you needn’t use a full sentence to greet people that you knew on the road. Quickly calling out, ‘Phries!’ was sufficient. It did the job – you had acknowledged them and that was the whole point so they would not complain afterwards with allegations that you were very proud when you were driving and did not talk to people. But the boys were even more challenged by the idea of getting older people to use it. They wanted the most unlikely people such as a figure of authority like a youth leader, or a parent, etc to say the magic word. Their joy knew no bounds when our choir leader, a dour-faced, stoic theologian, one day got up to give an announcement and before saying anything, he looked at the boys and said ‘Phries!’ At first, they couldn’t believe their ears, and so he said it again, looking straight at them. They went nuts. They laughed until they were literally rolling on the floor, slapping each other, slapping their thighs and stopping, and starting again. They had to be sent out of the room. Everyone found it very funny and rather unbelievable and the story was carried home by the youths. After that, it was a free for all. A man whom students had nicknamed Caliban, (After they had read Shakespeare’s Tempest) used to go past the Baptist High school every day. His job was transporting loads back and forth to the bakery. Poor Caliban was not quite all there. The boys taught him assiduously, and Caliban learned his lesson well. Each time the boys saw him and called out, ‘Caliban Phries!’ he would promptly respond, ‘Phries!’
It took some years for Phries! to die out. It became an all-purpose word, filling in for many occasions when the speaker did not feel inclined to use more words. ‘How is life?’ could be answered with, ‘Everything is just Phries!’ You know what I mean. Most of the time, it was used in a positive sense to convey something optimistic because the word itself was so upbeat. No one could say, Phries! and stay downcast. By the way, it is always pronounced with an exclamation mark, although you would have already noticed that by now. It was a word that was friendly, forthright and completely frank about its intentions. It was full of joie de vivre. The high-spirited word brought a smile to any hearer. Phries! was a precursor of many other words of the same ilk. But none of the others that followed had the longevity and the popularity of this one word. A single word that united people together, created laughter like a bond and memorialised an era by its uninhibited celebration of life which is what it really was. May your Christmas be as Phries! as it can possibly be.
