One day before the sun came out – and I’m confident that’s the way we’ll always refer to 2010 in the future – my son and I watched a documentary about the early days of the space program. From his perspective, looking at aging film from half a century ago, it was ancient and even amusing. Alan Shepard’s space suit looked like it came from a comic book, or a 1950s sci-fi film.

I had another reaction. Shepard was picked to be the first American in space because he was considered to be the most intelligent of the first seven astronaut candidates, and therefore possibly had a slight edge in being able to fix something should anything go wrong. And so many things could go wrong.

So here I was, nearly 50 years after that first 20-minute suborbital flight, holding my breath until we finally saw the chute. I am, I realized then, a Gemini kid, a little boy at the beginning of space flight, getting up early on those mornings to watch the launches, hope for the best and dream of the day when it would be my turn.

Kids have probably always imagined glamorous grown-up lives, fighting fires or riding the range, flying planes or beating the bad guys; I was fortunate to be of a generation that got to seriously dream of growing up to be a spaceman.

That was never going to happen, of course, but little boys never leave, they hang around in the lizard brains of grown men until the best possible moment for embarrassment. There are all sorts of famous people it would be fun to meet, and I can imagine polite and respectful conversations with them. If I were to run into John Glenn in, say, an airport, I’m certain that my only available options would be to salute or faint. Certain heroes don’t tarnish.

So I understand completely the reaction of Mike Myers, a few years ago, when one of our shuttle astronauts in a transmission made a statement and ended it with, “…NOT.” A silly Saturday Night Live catchphrase, dreamed up in a writing room for just a dumb recurring sketch about two teenagers, suddenly crackled back to earth from orbit. He was a little giddy, and I don’t blame him.

I think it would be a hoot to come up with something like that, almost by accident, a casual phrase that sneaked into the vernacular and stayed. The origins of these are mostly anonymous and also a little shrouded, but some writer on “The Simpsons” first wrote “D’oh!” and someone on the staff of “Friends” innocently had Joey say, “How YOU doin’?” Some things stick.

And some things get a little scrambled. Bogie never actually said, “Play it again, Sam” and Captain Kirk never exactly said, “Beam me up, Scotty.” George Washington almost certainly never chopped down a cherry tree and said, “I cannot tell a lie” (but that sure sounds like him).

Some of these have noble origins, even if we don’t realize it. An awful lot come from Shakespeare and Ecclesiastes; you can wear your heart on your sleeve, but there’s nothing new under the sun, even if you don’t quite know where it started.

There are odd ones, too. In 1928, the Chillicothe Baking Company produced the first commercial sliced bread, called Kleen Maid Sliced Bread. It was wildly successful, and rippled through society; people ate more bread, and thus ate more jam and butter and peanut butter, etc. Its slogan was “The greatest forward step in the baking industry since bread was wrapped,” which eventually morphed into “the greatest thing since sliced bread,” something we still occasionally hear.

And then there’s former NBA star Manute Bol. One of the tallest men (7’7) ever to play the game, Bol was an impressive shot blocker and by all accounts an immensely likeable man, although English wasn’t his native language. The story, which got retold around the Web at the sad news of his recent death, was that in his early NBA years, when he made a mistake on the court, Manute Bol, instead of saying “My fault,” would say “My bad,” and it caught on.

That’s one of the shrouded ones, hard to prove and possibly apocryphal. On the other hand, when Jim Lovell, aboard Apollo 13, said, “Houston, we’ve got a problem,” he surely had no idea it would outlive his mission; he had other things on his mind, as I recall.

The least of which was that, in fact, he’d actually said, “Houston, we’ve HAD a problem,” and that pilot Jack Swigert had said it first. These things do tend to get twisted with time.

And what was I talking about? Ah, yes. Little boy affection and awe, still alive after all these years, and space, the final frontier. Which Captain Kirk definitely said, I’m almost positive.