When I was a kid, I played a computer game where one of the non-player characters used the minced oath “strewth”. I found that so endearingly old-fashioned that I resolved to use it myself at every opportunity. Not having been one for cussing generally, I didn’t end up sticking with it for more than a week, though I still do use it jocularly (in writing) from time to time.
More recently I’ve taken to referring to our living room couch as the “chesterfield”, which is what my grandparents always called them. For some reason I get a kick out of it.
I’d like to see hitchhiking come back and become normalized. More to the point, I suppose, it would be nice for us to trust each other enough to make that work.
Instead of the silly practice of dressing major league baseball managers in team uniforms, I’d like to see them in old-time formal wear, like Connie Mack of the Philadelphia Athletics.
I know darn well that in the 1960s, there was a greater variety of cookies & snack foods in stores.
Now? Six brands of the same thing. Little flavor–lots of extra sugar.
In the mid-'80s I had a copy of Let’s Go: California. On hitchhiking, it said ‘Hitchhiking in California is tantamount to suicide.’ That line seems to have been deleted from later editions.
I would re-normalize letting kids play outside unsupervised with their peers, exploring the neighborhood and not spending large amounts of their free time in organized, adult-supervised activities.
I don’t miss handwritten stuff, but I do wish people would pay more attention to spelling, capitalization, and punctuation.
Once upon a time, doctors wore lab coats, nurses wore all white, and janitors wore dungarees or khakis.
Now that everybody wears surgical scrubs, they all look like janitors.
I think the ceremonial guards at the White House should wear the pre-World War One full dress uniforms.
We’ve still got lots of those in Vienna. Full-service clothing stores, too. Since I’m no fashion expert, I much prefer shopping there. The salespeople are actually knowledgeable about their wares, select a bunch of items they think might look good on you, and give you an expert opinion about how well they fit and whether they need alteration.
Radio dramas. (These were obsolete even when I was young. But there must have been a short-lived revival in the 1970s and 1980s, because I remember listening to the CBS Radio Mystery Theater.)
I’d make a similar argument for many different professions. I work in scientific research. Only a decade or two before my time, scientists and academics dressed a lot better—a collared shirt, and maybe also a tie and sports coat, for men, and similarly smart clothing for women. Nowadays almost everyone shows up in sneakers, T-shirts, and jeans. I’m not arguing for any sort of mandatory dress code, but I do think that the casual clothes make our work seem a lot less important and prestigious.
