The best example of this for me is the word “sucks”. In the 70s I remember this being a nasty dirty word with purely sexual connotations; over time it drifted over to be a rather innocuous synonym for “stinks” and its brethren, like “This sucks” and “I suck at this game”
I have even heard this spoken in casual conversation at church without anyone raising an eyebrow, because “sucks” has completely lost its edge.
I think most people would be shocked by how much stuff there is to buy. And central air /heat in people’s homes. The reason houses were so affordable in the 50s was they were just boxes with minimal electricity and plumbing.
When I was a child in the 50’s people just didn’t have ‘stuff’. You wanted stuff, it was easier to make it yourself. And rooms were heated one room at a time. Window air was shockingly new. TV was for rich folks. And I lived in an area where TV was available by 1950.
When I say rooms were heated one at a time, my childhood bedroom was heated by an open gas flame like this.
You can say “pissed off” on TV now, too.
My pastor has even used that word in sermons.
My Grandparents divorced in the early 60s, so only a little later, and my Grandpa wound up with full custody (and never remarried). People apparently thought it was a bit unusual, but it wasn’t a total shock.
The first time the time traveller lit a cigarette in public would be hysterical. “I can’t smoke in the building. I can’t smoke 50 feet outside the building? What type of a Communist state is this?”
Is your time traveler from before 1400 BCE? Or from Europe before 1500 CE? Then he would be puzzled seeing anyone lighting up something so dangerously close to their face, even in designated smoking areas. Smoking? What’s that?
The time traveler is from the 1950s, unless I lost track of the discussion somewhere…
People regularly dropped out of high school back then, so poor education would be no surprise. They will likely be shocked that people spend $40,000 to send their kids to a state school, to party and drink for four years…
Turning down perfectly good vaccinations, I agree would shock them. Many of these diseases were still rampant back then!
I guess the wormhole only goes to / comes from there.
I imagine a religious type would take the gay marriage thing and the widespread availability of just about any kind of porn of all levels of explicitness and figure that Satan had pretty much won and t he apocalypse would be coming Real Soon Now. Though this may not be all that difficult to explain as their mythology prepares them for it.
I’m pretty sure you’re in the wrong universe; in this time line it was Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Yokohama was destroyed by American bombers, but using conventional explosives.
Nagasaki was the city that Fat Man was dropped on.
I read through the entire thread and was coming in to state this! Smoking would be a big one.
Well, I’m from the 50s. Aside from the technological advances, a 50s person who just woke up from a coma might have a hard time understanding why men wear such voluminous bathing suits to the beach while the women are wearing the skimpiest pieces of fabric.
When I was a kid in the 50s, I remember my mother telling me that in the Soviet Union, there are women doctors, lawyers and engineers, or anything else they wanted to be. We both thought that was rather strange.
And I remember, I guess sometime in the 70s, when tv news people started to act more casually with each other. Before that, they were all male, and were dead serious all the time.
But I still say the greatest difference would be attitudes toward LGBT people. Nobody was out in the 50s, and even if they were, they’d be equated with child molesters or sociopaths.
Sex, sex, sex every day every where every way both visual and aural.
Pandora’s box.
Yup…did pretty good with that boxed exacta on the third race.
The idea that the “devil’s music” of rock and roll not only was not a fad, but survived in about 200 forms to become the biggest musical revolution in history.
There’s a TV show called The 4400, about a bunch of people who disappeared over the course of some sixty or so years, who all reappear at the same time, unaged, with no memory of the missing time. One of them is a black guy who vanished shortly after taking a savage beating for dating a white girl. As he’s walking around modern day New York, he’s amazed by the number of interracial couples he sees, and the way no one seems to care about his skin color at all. While it’s certainly better than the way things used to be, it just makes his culture shock stronger and stronger. Finally, he’s sitting in a cafe, having a cup of coffee, and some white punk kid is glaring at him, and he thinks he’s finally in a situation he understands - here’s some naked racism at last, just like he grew up with. Until the kid points over his shoulder, at the “No smoking” sign.
Eh, the rate is about three times higher now, but 10% of children were in single parent households even in 1960. It was hardly unknown, and I doubt it simply being more common would blow a time-travelers mind.
I’d say the same thing about bi-racial relationships as I said about race issues in general. The CA case invalidating miscegenation laws happened in 1947, so its not like bi-racial relationships were some sort of unknown. Depending on who he was, 1950’s guy might not have liked the fact that they were legal throughout the US now, but I doubt he’d have trouble understanding it. The wind was already blowing in that direction by 1950.
Ditto divorce rates. They’ve more then doubled since 1950, but then, 1950s-guy would probably be at least vaguely aware that they’d more then doubled between 1900 and 1950. I doubt he’d really have trouble understanding that a trend already apparent in his own time had continued.
I still think acceptance of gays is the only thing people have profered that 1950’s-guy would really have trouble wrapping his brain around. Indeed, judging by the demographic breakdown on polls about gay-issues, plenty of people that have traveled to our time from the 1950’s via the normal aging process do indeed have trouble getting their heads around it.
