New...Old sayings...

Dial a phone number.

 

tape a show

 

Old TV slogans, don't touch that dial, and rabbit ears antenna. Referring to a all brands of refrigerators as a Frigadaire. When "Made in Japan" was a insult (cheap, inferior product).

 

I heard a ToyR us commercial that said 'Just off the Wire' and had a line printer running and the user ripping the paper out of it.

99% of printers these days do not use perforated paper or impact printheads


I am old enough I hit the space bar twice at the end of a sentence. I think that went out with electric typewriters.

 

I know, right?

 

They're still "fairway woods" to me. I think the name "fairway metal" sounds kooky.

(OK, not a "saying", but you get the idea.)

 

TV remotes in the 50s - 70s were called clickers. They were mechanical devices that struck different length metal rods to emit ultrasonic tones to a receiver in the television set.

Oh, and a TV was called a set, short for television set which contained a tuner, display, and speakers in a single unit instead of separate components.

 

Yes, I still ask people to tape shows for me.

My daughter recently went to a friend's house, and came back saying that the friend had "really big, black CDs".

DJs still tell us to tune in to shows that are only available on digital or online radio.

In Britain, people still Hoover their floors, even though they're probably using a Dyson, and in China, people still put a Simmonds on their beds, although they have now stopped putting Bausch & Lombs in their eyes. Brand names can carry on for a long time for a generic item after the brand has lost its dominance.

And I suspect that "Give it some gas", and the even-more-common direct German equivalent will still be used by drivers long after we've all gone electric.

 

It's just occurred to me that I've called them DJs. They don't deal with discs any more, do they?

 

Yeah, they often do. CDs AND, believe it or not, vinyl too. It's not all MP3s. Of course, that's on stations that have actual people in actual studios, and not just computers...

 

Ah, yes.

The music stations I listen to most - BBC 6 Music (BBC - Radio 6 Music - Home) (which I'm listening to as I type) and Triple J (triple j - new music | live music | Australian music | Hottest 100 | Hack | triple j Unearthed) - tend to use a digital library most of the time, but they do occasionally bring out some vinyl or a CD. But it's when they make mistakes that you spot the MP3s (or whatever other format it might be): when they play a song that has absolutely nothing to do with the song they were planning to play, because they clicked on the wrong thing.

 

I resemble that too. But at least you did use electric typewriters in their era.

Now that my stepdad has lived long past his own expectations (set by male ancestors who never reached age 62), he is finally having to tackle numerous projects that he thought he'd never have to bother with. Last month he decided to start learning some computer basics. But his typing skills are exceedingly rusty, based on a 1913 Underwood Standard (which I even used during high school). The concept of the 'Enter' or 'Return' key, in place of the manual return lever, has been a hurdle.

 

Don't a lot of autocorrecting apps insert a period if you type two consecutive spaces? I'm not sure, since I disable most autocorrect functions on my devices, due to my desire to avoid unintended consequences.

A very early dedicated word processor I used (early 80s) had an autocorrect 'feature' (as opposed to 'bug' ) that could not be switched off, that, among other things, 'corrected' 'NASA' to 'nausea.'

 

I remember that then-Chinese-President Jiang Zemin was never a fan of MSWord's English autocorrect of his name.

And on a slightly less-offensive front, my Singaporean friends with the surname Teh always used to get very annoyed too.