I’ve noticed that technology has rendered a lot of words and phrases that we use all the time obsolete, but we still use them out of force of habit, or lack of a better replacement phrase. Some examples:
“Dialing” or “hanging up” a telephone - Dialing was obsolete by the '80s, and most cordless phones don’t see their cradles unless they need to be recharged; to say nothing of cellphones. I have heard of one “keying a number,” though.
“The boob tube” - With the explosion of plasma and lcd displays, there are probably millions of folks who do very little of their video watching on cathode ray tube based television, in fact, with so many movies and TV shows being shown on DVD and other recorded media, the word “television” itself is in real danger of becoming anachronistic.
So what words and phrases are you using and hearing that are on the way to obsolescence?
On a similar note: I was playing one of my old record albums one day when my son came in, listened a minute and then said, “What’s that?”
After I finished laughing, I proceeded to explain to a child who had grown up listening to nothing but cassettes and CDs the phenomenon of record scratches.
Whenever we record a program on TiVo, we still refer to it as “taping” the show, just out of habit. (“We” being me and my wife, not necessarily society at large).
Well… this is sort of a two parter… a phrase and a gesture “roll down a window”. These days, very few vehicles require “rolling”. Similarly, the same gesture still seems to be in common use.
When you play Charades and you want to signify that you’re about to do a movie title, you hand crank a camera. And nobody seems to think that’s weird.
Myself, I’m always directing patrons to look stuff up in the card catalogue. I don’t even notice it, but some of the kids look at me like I suddenly grew another head.
The concept of a record album comes from a group of one-song-per-side 78rpm records in sleeves, bound together like a photo album. We still say it, even though LPs made it obsolete.
The machine that packs down a new road is still called a steamroller. I daresay none of us here has ever seen a real steamroller.
Seeing a series of pix on a computer is still called a slideshow.
Another bit of telephone vocabulary left over from yesteryear is the hook (as in “leaving the phone off the hook”). In many early telephones, the mouthpiece was housed on the front of the device itself, and the receiver, or earpiece, was attached to the rest of the unit by a cable. When not in use, the receiver was, quite literally, stored on a hook.
On the other hand, with the gradual loosening of restrictions, even on major networks (Janet Jackson Wardrobe Malfunctions notwithstanding), “Boob Tube” seems even MORE appropriate.