The holiday season brings family members of multiple generations together, and the result is somewhere between beautiful harmony and very weird dysfunction.

During these times, the young, old, and in-between must interact more than usual, which can be challenging. For the more mature generations, of which I claim to be a part, it is important to know a few things about our youthful counterparts and what tricks they might be up to.

The first thing to know is that younger brains work faster than ours, and way faster than we talk. It’s like we are starting to express some idea, maybe just three words into a sentence, and they already know what we’re going to say. They are miles ahead, equipped with minds that function like high speed internet. (This is probably the result of them having played video games for two or three months at a stretch without sleep, during which time tiny particles of artificial intelligence have penetrated their brain through pores in their eyeballs.)

Not only are they faster than us, they also can be savvy in covert ways. Since they already know the ending to whatever story we’re telling, they have time to use their imaginations to conjure up alternative scenarios.

While nodding their heads and smiling politely, their eyes are looking through us at something more entertaining to them.

There is the ever-present danger that what is amusing them is some picture in their minds of us in some other place and time – perhaps a younger, cartoon version to help them escape our pedantisms.

One way to avoid becoming a victim of their silent sarcasm is to avoid using adages, idioms, or anachronisms. In other words, don’t use sayings that originated eons ago when dragging someone by the hair was considered foreplay, and men and select sheep enjoyed equal social status.

Be aware that if you use old sayings to communicate warnings or share wisdom with a young person, something will be lost in translation, and your spunky associate will be quick to fill the vacuum. For example, if you describe an untrustworthy person as a “fox in a henhouse,” your listener may be imagining you in dirty overalls inside a dilapidated chicken coop with a meat cleaver ready to do battle with the vixen who’s been stealing your eggs.

Staying with the poultry theme here, it’s likely your listener will disregard the frugality of not counting on unhatched chickens. Instead, they might be thinking about a guacamole and sausage omelet, or conjuring up images of you as a compassionate farmer in the old chicken coop incubating them with your warm breath and wool cap. Rather than worrying about investing all their hopes and/or money in one plan, they’re envisioning you carrying a basket full of eggs to the neighbor down a dirt road, only to trip over a rock, spilling the basket and breaking all the eggs. And the “bad egg” you are warning them about becomes Humpty Dumpty’s evil alter ego dressed up like Bowser, King of the Koopas.

In their minds, your advice about the early bird catching the worm might feature you dressed up as Big Bird at the crack of dawn out in the yard digging for night crawlers under some rotting wood. Something that “costs an arm and a leg” might render you a limbless torso (the return of the Black Knight!)

If you criticize them because they “missed the boat” they’ll cast you as Chuck Noland, alone but for Wilson, watching a ship sail into the distance. Tell them they are barking up the wrong tree, and they’ll imagine you up there on a high branch pointing to a tree across a wide field (they might even have the branch break beneath you). Tell them to stop horsing around and they’ll place you as a toddler riding one of those stick ponies and knocking over expensive vases at a hoity-toity neighbor’s house.

So stay away from idioms, mainly because they can make you look like an idiot. Another important thing to avoid when discoursing with the younger generation is the use of what you think of as casually disarming lingo in an effort to bridge the generation gap. To say “cool, man” or “I dig it” to a younger person just doesn’t win them over. They see you in tie dye T-shirts, bell bottoms and flowery headbands. To them, “back in the day” means something plain and simple: BORING!

So on Thanksgiving, after you say Grace and tell everyone to dig in, be aware that someone may be laughing silently, envisioning you as a wee person with a shovel jabbing away at a giant turkey leg. And, if proposing a toast, definitely stay away from “Bottoms Up”!

Bon Appetit! Peace Out.

Musician, writer, house painter Pete Howard lives in Dunkirk. Send comments to odyssmusic20@gmail.com

Peace out