Trigger warning: This article may make you feel old.
“Hanging up” a phone.
Future generations will only see wall phones in museums. They’ll be born into a world with handheld electronics and smart watches, so “hanging up” a phone won’t make much sense. Instead of physically placing the phone back onto its base, “hanging up” will simply be a touchscreen button that does the work for them.
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“Dialing” a phone number.
Back in the day, you had to stick your finger in a rotating dial to command a phone to call a certain number. The fact that people had to turn a dial for various lengths of time at specific number positions to make a phone call will be an ancient practice referenced in future history books. Nowadays, all people have to do is navigate their touchscreen devices to place a call. Or better yet, instruct Siri to do the tough task for them.
Sounding “like a broken record.”
Records and record players will one day be rare antiques, and future generations will have no idea how the oldschool grooved discs worked. When they got scratched or damaged, the same sound would be played over and over again. This glitch in one of the earliest tech devices inspired the expression of someone, “sounding like a broken record,” indicating that the individual is repeating the same thing over and over.
“Turning” a device on and off.
When technology was born, many devices had handles or knobs that people actually had to turn in order to release the flow of an energy producing substance like gas, steam, or electricity. In order to turn the device back off, turning the knob or handle back the other way would stop the flow of the energy. Nowadays, it’s as simple as pressing a button or flicking a switch. In the future, who knows how easy it will become. But phrasing the action as “turning” something off won’t make much sense.
“Rewinding” a tape.
First of all, future generations will probably have no idea what a tape is. Cassette players were sent into oblivion when the CD player was invented, so tapes are pretty obsolete. To future generations, the word “tape” will only signify the sticky stuff you use to hold things together, and the act of “rewinding” something will also be a mystery. Since video and audio used to be on strips of film tape that moved forward in order to play, you had to rewind the tape in order to re-play a film. To future movie buffs, that will seem like an absurd amount of work just to watch a movie.
“Burning” a CD.
“Why would you set a CD on fire?” future generations will ask. “Wait, what even is a CD?” It’s likely that this expression will get lost with the times as music continues to merge onto accessible programs like iTunes or Spotify that provide users with thousands of songs. But one thing’s for certain— people in the future will have no idea that expression to “burn” a CD meant to write or record content to it.
What’s your “screen name?”
Oh, the short-lived days of AOL Instant Messenger (AIM). Since kids as young as six-years-old are getting iPhones these days, they’ll never know what a “screen name” was or what it was like to chat with your friends on AIM during your 30-minute daily time allowance on the family computer. They’ll just be texting back and forth with cell phone numbers, with no idea of how much thought we put into making the coolest screen name possible.
“CC” someone in an e-mail.
CCing someone in an e-mail is a pretty common thing to do, but where did the expression come from? Back in the day, people made “carbon copies” of paper documents by transferring lines via carbon paper. This old method of copying a message got translated into the more modern use of e-mailing someone a copy of your message. Then again, who knows if future generations will even use email as a staple form of communication?
Getting out a map.
Sadly, the skills of artistry and precision simply won’t be needed for mapmaking anymore because of things like GPS and Siri. When future generations are lost, they’ll never have to “get out a map.” Instead, they’ll have to get out their phones to ask Siri or press a few buttons to recalculate their whereabouts on GPS devices.
Getting pictures “developed.”
Future generations will wonder what in the world it means to get a picture “developed.” iPhones and digital cameras snap instantaneous shots that can be sent to friends and family with a few swipes and taps on a touchscreen device. Pictures no longer need to be “developed” to see how they turned out, and people in the future will never even think about using the phrase.
Technology advances each and everyday, but with its development, some of the things we grew up with will become perplexities of the past. What seems so simple and normal to us will be cryptic to future generations — the oldschool phrases and objects puzzling them about what the world used to be like.
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