It wouldn’t have been that big of a deal in California in '88. A fair number of my more arty female friends had them by then. But five years earlier, not so much.
This isn’t a spoken line in media, but more about the “lines” in media. I’m talking about the old horizontal TV scan lines. If you do an image search for “tv scan lines”, you’ll see what I mean. It was used in an exaggerated manner in the “Max Headroom” TV series.
About two years ago, the company where I worked used TV scan lines as a background on a poster, indicating that the subject of the poster was something about video. A colleague mentioned that using TV scan lines in this manner was really dated, and wouldn’t work for a poster aimed at an audience under the age of 20 or 25.
That still sort of works for me on a different level. These days, I bet most people think of Apple as “Phone, tablets and… oh, yeah, they make computers too I guess” with a 6% market share for Mac computers.
Maybe better if the clerk says “Apple… Computers?”
Holocaust survivors did as well. In 1975 it would not have been uncommon to have thirtysomething women who were Holicaus5 survivors.
Arthur Conan Doyle A Case of Identity
:
“She pulled a handkerchief out of her muff…”
Reaching, IMHO. Certainly there were those who had tats, for various reasons, but in 1975 asking if an obviously “nice” girl had them was hilarious.
Have you met Lydia?
But that was an entirely different type of tattoo.
Anything that calls military special forces or other small military units as “Commandos” instantly dates it to pre-90s. It’s weird how language evolved so we know identify them as “Special Forces” or “Elite Units” exclusively now.
In the A-Team reboot movie they never once call them commandos in movie.
Jesus Christ.
Unless they aren’t wearing underwear.
In addition, members of the US military, all branches, are now referred to as warfighters.
In the U.S., maybe. Other countries still use the term.
Just about any old movie or TV show in which a character, often a newspaper editor, announcing some “shocking” piece of news prefaces his statement with “hold onto your hats, boys!”.
Also expressions like “shove off” and “hold your horses”. The expression, when a bunch of people, whether children or adults doesn’t really matter, who are goofing off, just having a good time, and the boss, teacher or commanding officer sternly tells them to “stop horsing around”.
“keep the home fires burning” is another, from the days when people burned coal for heating.
“greasy kid stuff” for hair tonic, still used when I was growing up. Gone now.
AFAIK, the term “Commando” is British, dating from their (not very pleasant) experiences in the Boer Wars.
From NWA’s 1988 song “Fuck Tha Police”
Fuckin’ with me cause I’m a teenager
With a little bit of gold and a pager
Searchin’ my car, lookin’ for the product
Thinkin’ every nigga is sellin’ narcotics
A little bit anachronistic by today’s standards…
A few years ago I had to sell some gold coins as part of settling my mother’s estate. In a city of more than 250,000, there were six places that advertised buying gold and only two of them weren’t gouging customers badly. Most of them were pawn shops. The two non-gougers were a coin shop and a jeweler.
Buying gold is easy, especially online. Selling it, without being taken, takes a little more effort.
The opening monologue of The Outer Limits said
Most people born after 1980 probably have no idea that television sets used to have little knobs called “vertical hold” and “horizontal hold” that had to be manually adjusted to properly synchronize the picture.
Yes, The Outer Limits is a great example.
Dated in a different way: all those peacock plume openings for NBC shows that were broadcast in color, of which there were only a few prior to 1966, when the networks went all-color for prime time.
In the fall of '66 most networks had some kind of “color opening” to make it clear to the viewers that the show they were about to see was going to be in color.
Interesting footnote: the comical opening of Saturday Night Live, especially when it premiered in 1975, as “live (rhymes with hive) from New York!”, a parody throwback to the early days of live television, when indeed that kind of announcement was a big deal, meant the what was to come was special. In its early years, through the Fifties I suppose, the TV networks seemed to feel the need to emphasize the “liveness” of the medium, as in more like theater, thus exciting, not like movies, as in made in advance. That was in itself, for several years, rather a selling point, long gone now…
There’s a scene in the movie Colors where a drug dealer’s pager goes off while he’s being arrested, and Sean Penn goes “Oh, what’s this? You a doctor or something?”
I remember an old episode of Leave It To Beaver where Beaver hears from a utility worker that the water main is going to be turned off for a few hours that afternoon. So he goes home and fills up as many milk bottles as he can find and goes around selling bottled water while the main is off. The whole premise of the episode was how ridiculous it was to pay for something like water, that you usually got for free, and Beaver’s whole enterprise was seen as borderline criminal.
“Did you just order a five dollar shake?”