Words we no longer use
 

The English vocabulary is constantly changing... what words (or phrases) can you recall that we rarely use any longer? Include a definition. (in keeping with CD rules, please only post appropriate language, thank you)

To get us started:

• carriage return (found on typewriters, it was the equivalent of today's Enter key)
  
• icebox (refrigerator that kept food cool through use of ice blocks)

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Coal Chute (where coal was delivered for the furnace)
Quill (used to write with)
Fountain Pen (refillable pen. Some had ink cartridges you replaced)

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carriage return - I thought that it was returning the borrowed horse and buggy

8 track - Before DVD, MP3, CD and cassette tapes. A form of music enjoyment.

Television dial - a round disk on the front of the TV. Numbered 2 to 13 and was used to change channels. Involved leaving the couch to see different channel. Before the term "channel surfing" was invented.

Vinyl - A round disk of pressed material containing recordings of word or music. Disc Jockeys today sometimes use vinyl to produce scratching noise. Played on a phonograph machine. Newer versions came with a record changer that allowed multiple pieces to be played without getting off the couch.

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spindle adaptors - usually a round column that you would place on the center spindle of your record player, which allowed you to play 45's - which had a larger hole in the middle (instead of LPs which had a small hole in the middle). Sometimes you used a 45 plastic insert in the hole which was an odd-shaped piece of plastic.

45's, LP's, and 78's - refers to the revolutions per minute that a musical record makes around the player. 45's were the equivalent of today's single CD recordings...

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From Dictionary.com:

chi·can·er·y /ʃɪˈkeɪnəri, tʃɪ-/ Pronunciation Key - Show Spelled Pronunciation[shi-key-nuh-ree, chi-] Pronunciation Key - Show IPA Pronunciation –noun, plural -er·ies. 1.trickery or deception by quibbling or sophistry: He resorted to the worst flattery and chicanery to win the job. 2.a quibble or subterfuge used to trick, deceive, or evade.

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Outdated phrases:
"Be Kind - Rewind" - found on VHS rentals
"Where's the beef?" - Wendy's advertisement
"I can't believe I ate the whole thing." - Antacid advertisement
"That's how I spell relief." -Rolaids advertisement
"Floppy disk" - Used to differentiate between 5 1/4" computer disk and more rigid 3 1/2" disk. Now refers to 3 1/2", which is mostly obsolete anyway.

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78's also usually only held one song, though at that high speed they were almost as large as a 33 +1/3 rpm album. Increasing data density on the platter (another archaic term) allowed smaller disc sizes or additional audio storage for more songs. Wikipedia has a good description of audio recording history here.

Increasing data density did not begin with audio recordings or the computer age, but has been a goal of mankind throughout history. A very interesting book on the subject is "The Race for Bandwidth: Understanding Data Transmission", written by Cary Lu.

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Kids


Floppy disk was used before 5.25 or 3.5 were even invented

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To go with this...
UHF Channels - the channels from 14 to 64 that you used a tuner or thumb wheel to dial in, and were very lucky if you added 5-6 channels to your 2-13 selection.


and boy were they floppy!!!

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Betamax never really even took off, but my dad's friend still swears that Betamax is/was better than VHS. Needless to say, he was extremely disappointed that his Betamax player was stolen.

Who knows...the Blu-Ray vs. HD DVD debate could end up like VHS vs. Betamax! :p

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Betamax rocked!

I still have the original Star Wars movies on Betamax.

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I use 'carriage return' a lot while programming, actually. ASCII 13. :)

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I loved the zzzip zzzing sound of the carriage return in my hs typing class.

transistor radio - mine was pink.

cherry phosphates - a soft drink from the soda fountain at the local drug store. You would sit in a booth, shyly flirt, and trade out your bubblegum Beatles trading cards - cherry phosphates rocked. You can occasionally find an old timey drug store that will still make you one.

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How about
Tube Checker

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Soon there won’t be any picture tubes either.

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Theres an icebox where my heart used to be :ahh:

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This thread made me think about words that are removed from dictionaries because of lack of common use. Stephen Chrisomalis has made a collection of "lost words" and listed them with definitions at http://phrontistery.info/clwdef.html It's fun to read his list - some of these words are great, like: yelve- a garden fork; welmish - pale or sickly color; tussicate - to cough.

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princess phones - a special style of phone which had a light-up dial, and came in cool colors
rotary dial phones - you turned the dial when using the phone, instead of hitting a button
party lines - several people shared the same telephone number

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Yes, and if I tussicated into the baby blue one while on the party line, everyone would yell at me and tell me to get off the line. *cough*

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Along that same line (bad pun) dose anyone use 'dial tone' anymore? I remember picking up the phone and listening for a dial tome before I dialed, but not anymore now that everyone uses cell phones.

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Laser disk players... not nearly as awesome as beta max, but pretty cool, until you hit the middle of your movie and had to flip the disk upside down.

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Rubbish: my grandmother's word for garbage
"Take this out to the rubbish bin."

Bin: a container for rubbish or coal (as in coal shute)

Are we seeing some connectiveness here?

Connectiveness: Newest word in educational jargon - does not belong in this thread.:cool:

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Carbon copy - the true meaning of the "cc" found at the bottom of documents, from the time when the secretary (another word we no longer use as the person who provides the greatest assistance in an office) would place a sheet of carbon paper between two or more documents as they were typed, producing a duplicate.

mimeograph and ditto machines - the way copies were made before the photo-copier. Ah the memories of the smell of the freshly dittoed purple papers (which apparently was a relatively nasty solvent with central nervous system effects!)

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Carbon Paper (Used in typewriters to make multiple duplicates while you typed)
IBM Selectric (typewriter)
Keypunch (You punched rectangle holes into cards that a computer would than read)
Mag Card (Used to make originals for forms)
Typewriter ribbon (Keys would strike ribbon and transfer letter onto the paper)
Slide Rule (Used to make complex computations before computers came around)


I still have a working laser Disc Player. It also plays both sides of the disc.

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Rotary Telephone already listed
Tin Foil
Mercury Thermometers

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Bulletin Board System: I never actually logged onto one of these, but the way I understand it, they were servers that you could dial (yes, a modem over a telephone line was high-tech) into to...chat with other people? Like I said, I never used one, so I have no idea. I would guess it's somewhat a precursor to our MUDs.
Mainframe: Need I say any more? I cringe when I hear people use this word in a modern sentence. (What is a mainframe, anyway?)
Cassette tape: old to me, but new to my parents.
Acoustic pickup (?): Before modems connected to the phone line, you would dial the BBS's number, then put the phone in the pickup to link it to the computer.

Correct me on these if I got them wrong--I don't know some of them.

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Actually, Bulletin Board System (BBS) style forums still exist. They are all modeled off of the highly successful 2channel in Japan. They are fully anonymous, with no registration required. They tend to run off of modified versions of either shiichan/futaba/wakaba (for image boards) or kareha (for text boards) script. Of course, since they are anonymous, they tend to be a haven for the less than pretty part of the internet. A lot of old Usenet forums were/are BBS. This is a good essay extoling the virtues of forced anon: http://wakaba.c3.cx/shii/

And my favorite archaic word has to be thou. English really needs a second person informal pronoun, you has been doing double duty for far too long.

Aside from that, phrontist(roughly means a thinker) and phlogiston(caloric fluid) are also good old words.

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slipstick: see slide rule
punch card: ancient computer programming language. You'd punch holes in the cards with a keypunch (thanks Wayne:)) and the computer would read the holes. Woe be unto you if you got the cards out of order!

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Aye, "dropping your deck" was an occurrance to fear. Might as well go home.

Timeshare system - a mainframe where users bought a portion of the CPU cycles for their jobs.
Line Printer - an electromechanical printer that printed text on wide greenbar a whole line (132 characters) at a time. Blazingly fast. Pre-dot matirx.
Dot Matrix printers.
Bubble Memory
Spark Transmitter
adding machine
linotype
half-space key on a typewriter
turntable, cartridge, needle
tube shield
selenium rectifier

I could go on for days...

Don

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Or dropping them :ahh:

At Purdue, I once wrote a keypunch program that was over 200 cards. I ran it through the computer and the program didn't work. I later discovered that the keypunch machine offset the holes by half the width of the holes. I had to redo the 200+ cards :mad:

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What?!? I'm not allowed to call it "tin foil" anymore? Just 'cause it isn't tin, doesn't mean I don't call it that! It's way easier to say than Al-u-min-eee-um! :p And we still have mercury thermometers - and a spill clean-up process in case one breaks!

On another note - I think this thread needs to go away! It is making me feel very very very old! :(

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library paste - an edible white thick paste (not like the white glue we use today) with a stiff brush that went through the cap. It was edible. Well, maybe not, but we all ate it anyway.
typewriter ball - used in a Selectric IBM typewriter, it moved across the page as you typed, and contained the letter characters. To change fonts, you put in a different ball.
word processor - a standalone machine dedicated to word processing.

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Roller Skate keys
PF Flyers
Pen Pals
Spark Gap Transmitters! Don you're killing me!

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CRT Monitors. They are going away faster and faster ... not extinct yet...
Goodbye - I can't remember the last time I heard that phrase. I think "adios" or "later" has become replaced goodbye.

On another note, when I have documents with small boxes to fill in, I pull out my father's typewriter from the 1800s and blow some dust off, and get to typing. I always enjoyed the half key because it made my paper look less cluttered in certain areas and it bugs me that there is no half space key on my keyboard sometimes.

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USSR
The British Empire
Persia
Siam
Constantinople
DUAT
Bacteriology
Leaded Gasoline
McDLT (keeps the hot side hot, and the cold side cold)
Hot wax - radio personality term for music so popular, with so much airplay, it would melt the records

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SWAK (sealed with a kiss), in reference to how a letter envelope was "sealed"
sealing wax (often used on my letters when I sent them to my pen pals!)

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But i hear swak all the time.

Hand Crank - Used to Start old cars (Model T. Which surprisinly could run on ethanol....And it took how long to make cars that run on ethanol?)

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Oops, it probably IS still being used, in IMs and text messages, huh? I was just thinking of ancient times when I and others actually hand-scribed letters on stationery to people that we put into the mailbox. Hmm.. stationery - still used, but on its way out?

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This one is still used, by making a come-back just this year actually in pop culture:

http://www.sing365.com/music/lyric.n...25720700134707


I have never heard the term "SWAK" in my life before btw.. lol

I learned something new today. w00t!

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Wow, between sniffing the purple paper and eating the paste, its amazing that we are still alive! :ahh:

As long as there are little girls, there will be pen pals, and stationery which as been SWAK. As a matter of fact, I just bought two boxes of stationery last night for my "big" girls, my daughter and our foreign exchange student. They have promised to send each other "real" mail, because they know that e-mail just isn't the same!

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<off-topic>
That's Istanbul, not Constantinople. ;)
</off-topic>

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cologne

and it is such a fun word to say and to spell.

Edit: You dotted your stationary with cologne before you put it in the envelope and SWAK'd. Yup. Can't do that with email. Nope.

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Uhm, I use cologne every day (i also wear it)

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Say it like a real German: Köln....

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No offense, but a lot of these words are either still used or were only made obsolete recently. I'm 17 and I know/remember/have a lot of these things.

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What happened to bacteriology?

Hey Elgin, ever hear Bobby Vinton's 'Sealed With A Kiss' ?
http://www.lyricsdepot.com/bobby-vin...th-a-kiss.html

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I loved that in college!!! The guys in the dorm mailroom always knew when I had mail.

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Ummm... men wear cologne and women wear perfume. Al, if you were getting cologne-scented letters while you were in college, no wonder the guys in the mailroom made comments about it!:yikes:

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I thought there was both women's cologne and perfume. At least I remember that quandry when Christmas shopping years ago. They don't make it em like they used to!

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There is - far be it from me to create confusion or add to it.

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Mercury thermometers were mentioned. I remember getting mercury from them and at school and rolling it around in our hands. I guess that that explains a lot.

Elgin, can you explain why you have never heard of SWAK?

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Audio Cassette: Music recorded onto magnetic ribbon enclosed in a plastic case.
Tape deck: Used to play audio cassettes.
Boombox: What people used to carry on their shoulders in public, thinking they were cool.
Streetcar: Electric trolleys (now called light rail trains).
Five and Dime: A convenience store where everything cost either 5¢ or 10¢. (Adjusted for inflation, 5¢ in the 1910's is about $1.00 today)
Pencil lead: The precursor to graphite.
Milkman: The man that would exchange your empty glass milk bottles on your porch for full ones.
Blue laws: When all businesses in Connecticut could not open on Sundays. (Although largely repealed, the sale of alcohol on Sundays in CT is still prohibited.)
Tracking Adjustment: When your VHS tapes became all screwy, you needed this to fix it.
Tin Lizzy: Slang for a Model T Ford.
Motoring: When driving used to be pleasurable. Often associated with pre-Eisenhower Interstate highways, such as Route 66.
If you mention Betamax, we can't forget U-matic tapes.

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Ok, Al, just to be fair, I looked it up, and by definition, cologne is watered-down perfume or "eau de toilette." So it could be for men or women. But by American convention, cologne is for guys and perfume for the gals!


And Art IV! Since I still have audio casettes and boom boxes in use at my house to play those audio casettes and a casette deck as part of my antiquated stereo system, I really don't think they count yet!!! I also have a cheap VCR and yes it has tracking adjustment on it as well! I'll give you the Five and Dime though, now it is definately the Dollar Store!

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I can remember a couple of really stinky colognes that women wore - they were of the heavy variety. Not that men's cologne is stinky. Far be it from me...*cough*

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I protest this entry in the thread. Blue laws is a phrase often heard in South Carolina. Usually in anger when you want to buy something you need on a Sunday morning and are stuck until 1:30. (Or, alternatively, after 6 on Sundays.)

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Hark! - an exclamation my grandmother would say to us kids if we were making too much noise when she was trying to talk on the phone (the big black one with a rotary dial which was part of the party line when I was a kid). It basically meant, "QUIET!" in that context, although it was also used to get our attention. As in, "Hark! The Herald Angels Sing".

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How about

Gee
as in
Gee Whiz!
or
Gee Whirlicers (dunno spelling on that one)

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I recorded tons of music from the radio onto cassettes as a kid, and I listened to the cassettes on a bona fide Walkman (oooh, another one for the lineup!) as recently as seventh grade. I still use VHS tapes for quickly recording television shows for my non-technology-inclined mother, although her VCR no longer has a manual tracking adjustment, as it automagically does it.

Oh how much I remember the joy or being four or five years old and figuring out that the "Tracking Adjustment" buttons on the VCR made the static go away. :yikes:


Walkman: The original portable music player. Usually consisted of an audio cassette player and an AM/FM radio tuner, although later models substituted the cassettes for audio CDs. Almost entirely replaced by iPods in the middle of the '00s decade.

And a few more I just thought of:

Duck and Cover: Oh no, it's the flash! Quick, duck and cover!
Fallout Shelter: Underground bunkers built in public buildings in the Cold War era from 1940s to the 1960s from fear of an nuclear bomb attack.

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there is still such a thing as a house phone though........You still need to do it if dialing a fax machine or calling somebody on a landline. Though I think it is useless for people like my family to have a house phone. We all have cell phones. My mom just doesn't ever answer it.

One of the Firefighters in my deptartment was talking the other day about how his first car he ever owned had a handcrank, and how his one friend broke his wrist starting his own car, and about why the electric starter was placed onto almost every car being sold in the 30's. It was apparently a saftey device, using a hand crank can cause kickback once the engine was started.
Wikipedia seems to agree....http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automobile_self_starter
Then they started talking about when gas was .17$ a gallon.

You get a Carbon copy anytime you sign a reciept.......

-John

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Hai Karate, perhaps? Old Spice?

And John, gas was $0.24/gal when I was in school in the 70's.

How about the Indian Head test pattern broadcast before TV stations started programming for the day. Followed by the National Anthem and station ID. Yes there was a time when TV stations were not on 24/7. For that matter, add 'horizontal hold'. "We control your horizontal and we control your vertical..."

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LOL, we never answer our house line. You want to speak with us, call our cells.
Actually John, since people on this forum tend to be really picky (oh, you engineering-types), when you sign a receipt, you receive back a "carbonless copy" - it uses specially-designed carbonless paper. :)

And Art's "fallout shelter" made me remember our "air raid drills" back in elementary school - similar to "fire drills", we gathered in the windowless hallways of our school and crouched down with our hands over our heads. Not sure how effective that would have been, but that's what we did.

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Interestingly enough, the paper that multi-copy receipts are printed on is called NCR Paper. Guess what NCR stands for? No Carbon Required. So officially they are not "Carbon" copies. Now for the purists, NCR also stands for the company which first developed the carbonless paper, National Cash Register, in Dayton Ohio.

oops - sorry John for the double wammy, I hadn't realized that Kathie had already commented on the carbonless paper!

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NCR is a trademark name for the paper. Carbonless is the generic name. Kinda like Kleenix vs tissue.

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ooou! That could be a whole new thread! What items do we call by a brand name even if we are using a generic or competitor's version? :]

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That link doesn't work, I'll have to look it up later at home, but isn't he the "Blue Velvet" singer?


Umm.. idk Is it a Canadian term? :p Just kidding. I just had to "go there". LOL

And.. umm.. I don't send love letters through the mail I guess?

And don't get me wrong, I've def. heard the term before, but never really thought about it's origins, or that it actually meant something.


As far as the cologne debate, I think AXE body spray is in time responsible for the killing of that term. It's easier to spray yourself than dab some cologne on your hands and rub it on you.


And what about a party line? That's one you don't hear nowadays, and I personally never heard of it until I started reading some of Emily Dickinson's short stories in my college Literature class.

Similar to total phone (kinda.. I guess).

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Elgin, I'm sorry the link doesn't work, it works for me...

Yes, he is the Blue Velvet guy.
Mushy.

:)

and...yup, there is a song called Party Line by the Kinks
here's another link. haha
http://www.seeklyrics.com/lyrics/Kinks/Party-Line.html

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That made me think of how seldom used the cents sign is these days...It doesn't even appear on keyboards! Most people just type $0.xx when they're referring to cents.

Also, remember $2 bills? I know they're not *that* old, but I always liked them. :rolleyes:

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Art: If you ever go to South Dakota School of Mines and Technology, the basement of their administration building (which also has a geology museum on the second floor) has/is a fallout shelter. And, you can still buy cassette decks if you know where to look. (Circuit City for one)

New word:

spaceball--upside-down roller mouse used for the same purpose as a mouse. The ball was just much bigger. Some still exist.

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Ethyl (gasoline with tetraethyl lead)
Reel-to-Reel (tape recorder)
Magic Eye (recording level tube, before v-u meters and led’s )
Nixie Tube (numeric neon display tube)
Discwasher (keep those records clean)
Dry Cell (usually a big carbon zinc battery with terminals)
Flashbulb (as well as Flashcube and Flipflash, before xenon strobes became cheap)
Hair Tonic (Vitalis anyone?)
Crew Wax (for a crew cut that will stand up to anything, before brylcream))
Rain Bonnet (those plastic pleated women's rain hoods)
Milk Chute (for the milkman)
Automat (restaurant where entire wall is a vending machine)
Hideaway Headlights (the cool 60’s cars had these)
Breaker Points (and Condensor) (change with every yearly tune-up)
Jarts ( fun but deadly lawn dart game)
Slide Projector (oh no, not more vacation pictures)
Cottered Crank (did your bike have one of these?)
Banana Seat (on your ‘Stingray’ bike)
Cheater Slick(also on your Stingray)
Clackers (two hard balls connected by strings)
Mood Ring
Uncandle (floating salad oil candle)
Close’nPlay (portable phonograph – distant relative to the walkman or ipod)
Give-a-show (projector)
Thingmaker (for making creepy crawlers)
Church Key (back when cans didn’t have pulltabs or poptops)
Trading Stamps (As a kid, a fun task was filling up stamp book with S & H green stamps)
Red Ball Jets (competition to PF Flyers)

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They still make those, however they are not very common.

Once a few years ago, my grandparents went and paid for everything over the course of about a month with $2 bills, as a joke. More recently, they've found a new way to get their kicks: paying for everything with the new dollar coins. :yikes:

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The term 'Cheater slick' is still in relatively common usage though. Nowadays, it generally refers to tires that have DOT certification as street legal tires, yet have levels of grip that approach those of racing slicks. They are generally used for races that require 'street tires', and are not even remotely practical for driving around town.

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"i fancy..." (basicly means to think or like)
automobile (most people say car)

I told my mom about this post and her comment was..." no body uses please and thankyou anymore!" :D

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Some networking trems:
Token ring
Daisy Chain

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Leaded Gasoline Only
Lead for mech. pencils (some people still call it this.... even though it's really graphite...)

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I hear daisy chain all the time, but then again that is talking about shift registers. Did they have SSI when our mentors were kids :p [/sarcasm]

-John

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Yeah, I've heard daisy chain a lot. Robotics, pit orchestra (when we were attempting to put a monitor (speaker, not like computer monitor) more towards the back of the stage), whenever I can sneak it into a conversation... :rolleyes: