Words we no longer use

[Mike]

Theres an icebox where my heart used to be

[Cynette]

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.

[KathieK]

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

[JaneYoung]

Originally Posted by KathieK

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

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*

[Jeff Rodriguez]

Originally Posted by KathieK

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

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.

[KelliV]

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.

[Andrea's Mom]

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.

[Cynette]

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!)

[Wayne Doenges]

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)

Laser disk players

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

[whytheheckme]

Rotary Telephone already listed
Tin Foil
Mercury Thermometers

[JBotAlan]

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.

[4throck]

Originally Posted by JBotAlan

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.

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.

[EricH]

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!

[DonRotolo]

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

[Wayne Doenges]

Woe be unto you if you got the cards out of order

Or dropping them

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