LONG IN THE TOOTH

If you look up the idiomatic phrase "long in the tooth" in the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary the meaning given is "rather old". I first came across this phrase a long time ago when I was in Form 5 and the origin of this idiomatic phrase had always puzzled me until recently. At my age, living examples of "long in the tooth" keep cropping up and staring me in the face and while I am now more enlightened, I have also become more apprehensive. The nagging fear that one fine day I will be, literally, "long in the tooth" haunts me. Not long ago I met an old acquaintance at a wedding dinner and while we were standing hardly 3 feet apart swapping tales of days gone by, I became aware of the fact that one of his canine teeth was at least one and a half times longer than the other teeth. It suddenly dawned on me that I was staring at a living example of "long in the tooth". From that moment onwards I could not concentrate on our conversation. My mind started to wander and I wondered how dreadful he would look if both his canine teeth were equally long. He would look exactly like Dracula! Since then I have come across a few more examples of people of my age group who are showing signs of being literally "long in the tooth". If that happens to me one day, I promise to post a photograph of myself in this blog, showing why being "long in the tooth" means "rather old".