4/27/20 What the hell does that mean anyway?
18So, when you save something on your computer you click on an icon that looks like a floppy disc, an antique piece of tech that no one uses anymore. Do most young people even know what that represents?
When you talk about something that rotates you define it as clockwise/counterclockwise. But hardly anyone uses an analog watch anymore and digital displays are ubiquitous in the household. So how long before nobody knows why that is even a thing?
When you want to sign “call me” to someone, you stretch out your thumb and pinkie and hold them up to your face by your ear and mouth. How many kids these days have ever even seen a phone that goes into a cradle? Why not just hold up your palm to the side of your head with your fingers out straight?
When you say the same thing over and over you are a ‘broken record’. Why?
Any other pieces of tech you can think of that are still frequently referenced but no longer in use?
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“I missed the game last night. You didn’t tape it by any chance, did you?”
“She’s a carbon copy of her mother!”
@ybmuG you hit the nail on the head there, friend!
@UncleVinny that’s good to know. I thought I was screwed.
@UncleVinny @ybmuG
Good one!
@ybmuG that’d be a sticky wicket!
@UncleVinny ah, put a cork in it!
Looking at your wrist or tapping it to find out what time it is. Yes some wear smart watches, but most people check their phone for the time.
The only other phrase thing I can think of at the moment is be kind, rewind’.
My kids know all of the above and other odd references. I know the other day my daughter (21) and I were watching something and they mentioned Waco. So I paused the tv and asked her if she knew what that was. Luckily she did. I think I had to explain once what ‘going postal’ meant and why. Unfortunately that isn’t limited to postal workers any more.
@remo28
I’ve explained the “drinking the koolaid” reference to my son.
Sure, I’ll just Xerox that for you.
@jst1ofknd well, that would be a Kodak moment.
@RiotDemon
At my work they have rubber coasters shaped like floppy disks. Someone printed this like Company Financials and Passwords on them. Funny stuff.
@jst1ofknd
https://www.amazon.com/Silicone-Coasters-Diskette-Protection-Furniture/dp/B00A2UUJRW
Any reference to “crank” in starting up car engines or music. I’m pretty sure none of us were alive the last time those were in common use.
And every once in a while, I hear someone use “icebox” for a refrigerator.
@mehcuda67 after you crank the car, make sure to roll up your windows
@mehcuda67
/giphy this one goes to eleven
@mehcuda67 @ybmuG
I have an 2004 Chevy Silverado that has manual windows so I do actually have to roll them up and down.
@jst1ofknd @mehcuda67 @ybmuG My 2014 Nissan Versa has crank windows. My '01 Tacoma also does, but that’s less surprising.
@jst1ofknd @Limewater @ybmuG Yup! I have a 2000 Silverado with crank windows. And manual transmission and manual 4WD. It helps keep me in touch with he primal driving experience.
“Buffet?, at a restaurant?” What are those???
@phendrick I miss buffets at my favorite Chinese restaurants. Wonder if they will ever be back? I cannot visualize customers going through the line wearing face masks and piling up food on their plates. Will they check customers’ temperatures coming in the door and make them use hand sanitizer there? The alternative would be hiring a lot of servers to dole the food out, increasing the cost a lot.
@phendrick This is so sad!
You wanna go outside?
@ybmuG Let me shake your hand for that one.
@mehcuda67 @ybmuG Put 'er there, pal!
Speaking of phones, ever “drop a dime” on someone? (Of course, then it was a quarter for a long time; now it’d take a credit card.)
@phendrick Yeah, back when pay phones were still a thing.
And you used the phone book to look up someone’s number.
@phendrick or “feed the meter”?
@phendrick @ybmuG Almost all parking meters I see still accept change.
@Limewater @phendrick true here too but most have been replaced by parking stations where you buy a receipt to put on the dash.
@mike808 @phendrick “Let your fingers do the walking through the Yellow Pages.”
Actually, we still get printed phone books in the mail even though we haven’t had a conventional landline for quite a while (small rural county). When I find them in the mailbox, I always do the obligatory “The new phone book’s here! The new phone book’s here!” bit as I carry it back to the house.
@macromeh
The Jerk has a wealth of memorable quotes and scenes… Thanks for the reminder that I need to watch that again!
@chienfou @macromeh For some reason I want to make pizza in a cup…
@chienfou @macromeh @ybmuG I can remember being in grade school and my mom would put a dime in each of my penny loafers. She told me if I ever had an emergency I could use them to call her! I don’t think I could make a call with a dime anymore lol.
@macromeh @mike808 @phendrick
We just got our “phonebook” yesterday. It’s more like a magazine than a book.
It reminds me of a scene from a movie I saw once where someone had a child with them at a restaurant. This person asked for the phonebook so the child could sit on it and reach the table better, but they were in a small town and not their big city so it didn’t help at all.
@jst1ofknd @macromeh LOL. I don’t know which town that is, but I’ve probably been in it – it’s in Texas.
Ever seen the movie “Dial M for murder”?
Or had a party line?
@mike808 yes, until I was in high school
@mike808 @ybmuG I remember when our “number” was Walnut 8-7927.
Ever wonder WTF a Tesla has a gas pedal for?
@mike808 Actually, they refer to it as the accelerator pedal.
@cinoclav @mike808 AQUTUALLY
My wife and kids have no idea what a “deposit slip” is or how to use one.
@mike808 because of on-line banking, or because money NEVER goes into an account??
@chienfou They have no idea.
@mike808
Funny, my wife and I just had to do a deposit slip today. The first one we’ve done in years.
Let’s go to the drive-in movie.
@mike808 This!
On US Hwy 61 about 4 miles south of Maquoketa, IA, is the Hwy 61 Drive In. I took my wife there on a date about 3 years ago. Good times!
I wonder if they will reopen this month. Lots of social distancing, car to car…
@mike808 https://nypost.com/2020/04/20/drive-in-movie-theaters-poised-for-a-comeback-in-the-us-amid-coronavirus-crisis/
Technology would certainly make it easier to reopen them these days.
@mike808 I have a drive-in within 5 minutes of my house that still does (or at least did) good business. It is part of a local theater chain (all the other venues are traditional auditoriums) and near the start of all this, it announced the drive-in would stay open while the other locations would temporarily close. That lasted all of two days before they were mandated to close like all other non-essential businesses.
@mike808 “Movie” - because “moving pictures” were once a marvelous novelty…
Even watching a “film” is no longer literal!
Where is “the clicker”?
@mike808 My wife and my in-laws refer to a TV remote control as a “flicker”. When we first started dating, the question “Do you know where the flicker is?” drew a blank stare from me. They were all pretty convinced I was the odd-ball for not using the term.
“You know, to flick thru the channels…”. I explained that while I sometimes “flip” thru the channels, I don’t call it a flipper.
I feel like I’ve seen and/or maybe even done it myself where you hold up a hand to your head like you’re cradling a phone in it. I definitely haven’t done the extended pinky-thumb phone in a long time.
@dijit27
/giphy call me
I kind of like these linguistic relics of the past. As a hobbyist letterpress printer, some of my favorites are “upper case” and “lower case” - because on a type case the CAP letters are in the upper part of the physical case, and the non-caps are below. Also, “mind your p’s and q’s” because if you’re setting type you’re seeing the letters in reverse. And one that I know well from experience is “being out of sorts,” because a “sort” is a particular letter, and if you’ve gotten almost to the end of a long piece of text only to find that you’re out of "e"s you are literally AND figuratively out of sorts!
@Kyeh
I’m just now wonderin if my moms old sayin when you’re feelin out of sorts or can’t really get a grip came from typing? I’m at 6’s & 7’s is what she says.
Get a grip; where did that come from?
@Kyeh @Lynnerizer Get a grip comes from either horse reins or a car’s steering wheel, in that losing control of either would be disastrous.
@Lynnerizer @mike808 yeah, get a grip still sounds pretty contemporary. 6s and 7s is interesting - I wonder about that one too!
@Kyeh
That’s really cool. I didn’t know the upper/lower case reference, nor the “out of sorts” one. OTOH I always heard the p/q one alluded to “pints and quarts” in English pubs…
@Kyeh @Lynnerizer @mike808 Here’s the Wiki for 6s and 7s
Pretty interesting stuff.
@chienfou Hah - well, getting a quart instead of a pint would probably mess up your typesetting in a big way. It’s the "b"s and "d"s that give me the most trouble.
@chienfou @Lynnerizer @mike808 That IS cool. It also reminds me of a silly kid’s joke that I love: “Why does 6 fear 7?” “Because 7 ate 9!”
@Kyeh But why did 7 eat 9? Because 7 heard you’re supposed to eat 3 squared meals a day.
@cinoclav
5 and dime store … Woolworth, Kresge.
/image Woolworth
That last sentence is exactly how my kids pretend to talk on the phone.
@Limewater See… it’s coming!
my husband is 63 today. that’s what it means. to me.
@lisaviolet
HBD to hubby and “I see what you did there…”
How about “porn stash” in reference to a box of filthy magazines you hide from your mom instead of a reference to facial hair?
@jst1ofknd @RiotDemon Even calling the little rigid discs “floppy” is anachronistic - from the really ancient ones, about 5" across, that really WERE floppy! (I know there’s a TWSS in there somewhere…)
@Kyeh And before that, there were 8" floppy disks. When I got my first SW job, we had SS/SD 8" floppy disks with a whopping 128K bytes of storage!
Bzzt-Clack!-Clack!
@Kyeh @macromeh And the original extra floppy…
@cinoclav @Kyeh @macromeh
Not the “Hanging Chads” again!
@mike808 Nah, this is when punch cards were some quality shit!
@Kyeh Sorry to be that guy, but even the 3.5 inch disks were floppy. They had a rigid plastic shell, but the magnetic disk inside was still floppy.
@DrWorm Well, yeah - a lot of things are floppy on the inside!
So, remember when video games only worked on channel 3?
Remember when it was a treat for kids to be let loose from the house, to go outside and play?
: (
/image video game console
/image child in tree
@f00l
Sigh.
Of course, that was during a time when it was usually considered reasonably safe to let K-6 age kids to run around in packs, so long as they stayed together as a group, and so long as the parents trusted the esp older kids to keep an eye out, to be leaders, and to put a brake on stupidity.
“Free-range childhoods” of my youth must have been a big influence on social relationships and self-reliance thru life.
If Mark Twain’s novels are accurate about that world, then even kids from the (usually more controlled) upper-classes had enough independence to sometimes or often roam free on the Mississippi River and in the woods and fields.