Here’s one I heard today.
I’m playing your stereogram
Singles remind me of kisses
Albums remind me of plans
Squeeze-“If I Didn’t Love You”
Believe it or not, I still occasionally hear those small handheld radios referred to as transistor radios. Just that specific type.
A super-powered mind,
A mechanical canine,
He rescues the day
From sure destruction
Ignoring the “stereogram” part, which isn’t dated regardless of how it’s defined:
There’s two ways you can go with this: You can take the hard-line (and stupid) tack that albums are only, and can only ever be, those collections of songs released on vinyl to be played on a Hi-Fi in stereophonic (as opposed to merely stereo) if not quadraphonic sound. Preferably while wearing brown, smoking and/or passing a totally illegal at the Federal and state level joint, and complaining about how horrible it is to have ultra-conservatives like Nixon in office.
The other way is to define an album as a “collection of tracks meant to be experienced as a cohesive whole”, and notice that songs are very often sold by the track these days even moreso than they were in the 1950s/early 1960s, because digital downloads don’t have B-sides.
The point is, neither of those are entirely on point as marks of datedness: Vinyl is a very potent mark of authenticity in some subcultures, giving it more tenacity than it had when it was merely the default choice, and “albums” defined as multi-track cohesive works are not only still being made, they’re still being sold.
These things are dated to the extent they’re no longer the ironclad defaults, but they’re still thriving in some worlds and show no sign of going away.
The datedness, then, is more about the idea of having such defaults, with pop culture being unquestionably defined as a single mainstream and numerous alternative or counter-cultures in opposition to that mainstream. With the traditional mainstream-seeking record industry in free-fall, that is clearly no longer the case.
The new Wendy’s ad where “Red” butchers a version of “All By Myself” by Eric Carmen got me thinking of some of the lyrics that are probably now out of date.
Living alone
I think of all the friends I’ve known
But when I dial the telephone
Nobody’s home
If it was written now of course, he’d probably be calling their cell phones, giving him a better chance of reaching them, or more likely trying to text them. Of course that would make it harder to write melancholy lyrics.
Yeah. It’s hard to write a song about always getting voicemail. You could say you keep calling their cells, but they don’t answer, because “they’ve left them at home.” The thing is, the audience is going to know that really, they’re ducking you by sending you to voicemail when they see your number on caller ID.
Funny about dialing-- no one (except my mother) has done that in maybe 20 years, but we still say it. There’s even “voice dialing.” 'Course, I guess we haven’t “hung up” phones since the 1920s, but we still say that as well.
Not sure about that. My parents have a phone that is no older than 1980s vintage mounted vertically on the divider between their kitchen and dining area. There’s a button on the handset that will cut off the current call and give you a dial tone. But the normal procedure is that when you finish talking, you just replace the handset in the vertical cradle to terminate the call.
Sure feels like hanging up to me.
It’s a coincidence, though. There was a long period of time when people did not literally hang up the earpiece on a hook. The candlestick phone was the last one. After that, the earpiece and speaker were in one piece. It was several more decades before wall-mounted phones with a single speaker-receiver were manufactured. In the interim, the expression “hanging up” remained, and it remains still. People talk about “hanging up” their cell phones. Really, what else should we say. We’re not “shutting it off,” because were not shutting off the phone completely. I doubt people will start talking about “terminating the call” just because we don’t actually hang anything up.
Also, we don’t “turn off” the phone. We don’t literally “turn” off most thing with power switches. Once upon a time, the majority of power switches on electric devices were knobs that turned one way for “on,” the other for “off.” Very few things have turning switches now-- dimmer lights, mostly, but we still “turn” things on and off.
Telephone technology figures large in this thread. How about:
Ev’ry single morning, you will hear me yell,
“Hey Central! fix me up along the line.”
He connects me with ma honey
Then I ring the bell
—“Hello! Ma Baby” (1899)
Saying “Hello Central” to place a call was obsolete long before any of us was born. It puzzled me at first when the phrase came up in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. This song was so far back, in those days “Hello!” was only used for ascertaining telephone connections and hadn’t yet become an all-purpose greeting.
Actually, I remember when you had to use operator assistance to make international calls. Also, when I was really little, even though you could direct-dial long distance, sometimes, on days like Mother’s Day, the lines would be clogged, and we couldn’t get through direct dialing, so we’d (my parents, anyway) call the operator, and ask her to put the call through. In both cases, we’d hang up after giving the operator the location and the number, then once the operator had the call patched through, our phone would ring, and the operator would say something like “I have your party on the line,” then the operator would get off. Probably cost more, but that I wouldn’t know.
ETA: The line “ragtime gal” also dates that song pretty well.
Maybe it’s just because I woke up, but that brought out my inner 12 year old and I can’t stop laughing.
Sorry.
I hate you.
:eek: 
We’re splitting some pretty fine hairs here, but I would argue that setting down the handset in the cradle of a desktop phone came pretty darn close to hanging it up, as the mouthpiece and earpiece would then “hang” below the cradle itself. And the desktop phone was certainly the most ubiquitous model in most homes, I’m thinking from sometime in the 1930s through the 1970s and perhaps beyond.
Let’s remember, too, that pay phones, once they went from the separate earpiece and mouthpiece to an all-in-one handset design, also continued to be “hung up” at the conclusion of a call.
I’m just saying it’s not surprising that the “hang up” terminology persisted well beyond the era of the candlestick phone.
Oh, c’mon, you know I’m kidding. 
Somewhere there must be a song that speaks of a “dial tone,” too. (The only one I can think of, though, was by a local singer-songwriter from my college days who wrote of talking to his far-away girlfriend, and after the call ended he was “…still listenin’ to your dial tone.” I always liked that.)
But in any case, as more and more people do away with their landline service and go exclusively to cell, fewer and fewer kids growing up will have any idea what a dial tone is — much less the notion that you used to have to initiate a call, and then dial the number, instead of the other way around.
Pursuant to other posts, I’ll join the old codgers’ party by saying I remember quite well when making a long-distance call always involved an operator. If it wasn’t too complicated, you could wait on the line while she put you through, but as noted, sometimes you would have to hang up and wait for her to call you back.
And let’s not even get started with party lines, which are also within my memory! (Which reminds me of another song with dated lyrics, “Party Line” by The Kinks.)
The Western Electric 653 wall phone was made from the 30s through the 50s. The WE 354 wall phone, with a “modern” handset was also made from 1937 through the 50s. There doesn’t seem to be any time period from the introduction of the telephone on where there wasn’t a wall phone available where the handset was literally hung up available.
Whew, a random Internet person doesn’t hate me. Thank goodness.
Funny. There are two types of party lines. The first (and only) one I was aware of for years was the type in the 80’s where you and a bunch of other people call in talk to each other, Commercial (and apparently there was one with 16 digits?:dubious:). Anyway, it wasn’t until years later that I heard about this type of party line
My mother has a landline, and no voicemail, just an answering machine integrated into the phone. Sometimes when I call, and the line is busy, I don’t get sent to voicemail, like I would with someone cell phone or broadband line, but I don’t get a busy signal either-- you know, that obnoxious, loud buzz-- I get a voice that says “Sorry, the number you are trying to reach is busy. Please try again later. Goodbye.” Then I get disconnected.
A few in Pink Floyd’s “Nobody Home”:
“I’ve got thirteen channels of shit on the TV to choose from”
“I’ve got the obligatory Hendrix perm”
“I’ve got a pair of Gohills boots”