In Which I Make Like a Regular William Safire

Allan Sherman

For reasons not relevant to this post, someone in a recent online discussion brought up a line by Allan (“Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah”) Sherman, the bard of Jewish postwar suburban life. In his 1962 song “Sarah Jackman,” an imagined telephone conversation to the tune of “Frerè Jacques,” one of the call-and-response couplets goes, “How’s her daughter Rita?”/“A regular Lolita.”

It reminded me of a question I’ve pondered for years: How and why did “a regular X,” where X is a person fam...