sid | A timely thought

lock, stock, and barrel

Good one! I think it was only a few years ago that I actually learned the original meaning behind that.

Cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey!

Ooh, what does that one mean? Hi! :-)

CC doesn't mean what it used to.

(I remember watching my Mum make carbon copies when she was typing things up in the eighties but I haven't seen anyone else do that in decades).

My elementary school had a bunch of carbon paper that I suspect had been discarded from someone's office at the after school club! This would be in the late nineties. It was FASCINATING :P

I know! You type or write or draw something and magically there is a copy of it! It was great stuff :)

When Mum moved on to using a word processor and a printer my brother kept all the carbon paper for making copies of all his technical drawings of his 'inventions' (which were usually things that involved Lego, elastic bands, random bits of cutlery and a Wile E Coyote approach to physics).

As far as I know, CC is still the standard. But I've noticed that when my attorney copies me on something there is only one C! Maybe that old usage is being questioned now.

I probably have made carbon copies (using loose sheets of carbon paper) somewhere in my past. *g* Who can remember back that far? I know I typed a lot of 3-part forms. Some had carbon layers between and some made carbonless copies.

Hi!

I think CC is still the standard because the terminology made its way into email programs but one of the apprentices (they're all in the 16-19 age group) asked what it actually meant a few weeks ago and their tutor turned up in my server room to grumble that this made him feel old, which is why I remembered it when I saw the link to your post :)

And hello and thank you for asking the question! It's really interesting seeing what everyone else has thought of.

I was hoping that people would have a lot to say! :-)

I'm wondering about 'I wouldn't touch X with a barge pole' now. Not everyone seems to get what that one means any more.

Your average person doesn't run across too many barges, true!

Prompted by your horse-holding -- "Giving [X] free rein."

I've already seen that one folk-etymologized into "free reign" on several occasions. (And the misinterpretation makes just as much sense, honestly!)

(here via

trouble)

I have only rarely seen it correctly. Still bugs me. *wry g*

sid, another one for you: having a "nest egg." :)

Yes, 'free reign' bugs me, too. It makes sense! But it's wrong, wrong, wrong! LOL

Nest egg - I never knew the origin of that! And it actually doesn't make sense. There's a leap you have to make to reach the current usage. But I wonder if that old ploy is still being pulled on today's unsuspecting hens. :-)

I was pondering the nest egg phrase -- I'm pretty sure the metaphorical phrase came into use while nest eggs were still being used in the literal sense -- and I think it does make sense if you look at it sideways. It's something left over when everything is gone, something kept back that gives you a place to start over. Odd little phrase, though.

As for pulling a fast one on the poultry: commercially, no, and I doubt it's necessary if they're restricted in range/limited in suitable places to lay. But given their liberty, they *will* hide their clutches if you take all the eggs -- hens cannot distinguish between "one" and "more," but they can tell the difference between "some" and "none," and reach the absolutely correct conclusion that someone's nicking the eggs! So I know I have used a nest egg to keep them laying in a nest I have found. Saves hours of searching. :)

(You know how far you've sunk when you're engaging in a war of wits with a chicken.)

I remember a chicken coop in my grandparents yard when I was young. The chickens were long gone, but the smell lingered on....

(as long as you're winning that war, it's okay!)

Whoa! :-D

Oh, you nay-sayer. *g*

(Hi, by the way. Great discussion/trivia topic!)

(Hi! I'm happy that 3w4dw and my random thought coincided and that so many people have come out to play. :-)

I SEE THAT METROPOLIS ICON THERE.

<3

As to your actual question, I know it took years for me to figure out 'a stitch in time' (I kept mistakenly associating it with A Wrinkle In Time), which is one I can imagine fading out of use for certain classes of people as high-end clothes transition to nano- and other seamless material. (Now that I'm independent, of course, I'm only all too aware that yes, a stitch in time does save nine, so grab those threads and needles stat.)

Some other ones...(cheats and looks at Wikipedia to get the exact phrasings); as is with the one above, there certain assumptions re: culture and privilege in terms of whether the saying in question still might have some experiential teeth.

Take it with a grain of salt.
All frills and no knickers.
Born with a silver spoon in his mouth.
A candle that burns twice as bright burns half as long
To burn the candle at both ends.
Don't have too many irons in the fire.
Strike while the iron is hot.
Never look a gift horse in the mouth.
Don't put the cart before the horse.
Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. [BOMBS AWAY!]
For want of a nail the shoe is lost, for want of a shoe the horse is lost, for want of a horse the rider is lost.
Good wine needs no bush. [Thank you As You Like It]
Not enough room to swing a cat [one hopes this is anachronistic]
There's more than one way to skin a cat. [as mentioned previously...]

I've never heard 'good wine needs no bush', but now that I've looked it up I like it!

Candles, irons, most anything to do with horses. Lots of good ones!

I've heard that swinging a cat means swinging a cat o' nine tails, not a feline, which is bad in its own way I suppose!

*googles* Looks like that's right! I should have known that, being into Age of Sail. *tsks*

At least the ship's cat is safe. :-)

...that saying makes a lot more sense now.

dialing a phone, dial tone

typing. my kids learn keyboarding, which is.... wrong.

And along with that, the reasons of why we have the QWERTY layout will also probably be lost. The layout itself, however, will probably remain, unless someone really successful does something about it with the default layout of one of their products...

yeah, like the metric system, i fear the dvorak keyboard is a logical wonderful thing that the USA will never embrace. which is SO WEIRD.

Both of those things, though, take both time and energy to learn. Something that not all of us have in plentiful supply...

oh, certainly. but i am old enough to remember when we ALMOST went metric in the seventies. so close and yet so far....

i'll never learn dvorak now; it's too late for me. but if the whole country decided to teach fourth graders dvorak only? in a generation it would be done.

I never could grasp metric, so I was relieved when that plan fell apart. Stubborn!America iz stubborn.

I'm still not metric - I have to ask always, 'what's 500 g really?' I'm thankful that I'm not alone: it's still qutie possible, over here, to walk into a wood yard and ask for 2 metres of 2 by 4 ;-) And we always, *always* do cold in Centigrade and hot in Fahrenheit, what's with that?

You're a very confused people, aren't you? :-D

We prefer to think of it as 'ploughing our own furrow' ;-)

On the "dial" note... I remember seeing some badly translated instructions once-- can't remember specifically what for, but it was some sort of electronic device made in China-- where the term "stir" was used to refer to dialing a number. (Google confirms the commonness of this mistranslation.) Thing is, that actually makes perfect sense when you think about the context of an old-fashioned phone dial-- and yet, it just sounds so weird.

Yeah, it's pretty much the same motion at a slightly different angle! Unless you're a person who normally stirs things counter-clockwise - that would not transfer well to dialing a number! :-D

And speaking of problems dialing numbers, I remember the first time I used a phone. I was probably about six years old, calling my father to pick me up from a schoolmate's birthday party. I don't remember if I had trouble figuring out which way to turn the dial. I did succeed in dialing my number, though.

And then I picked up the handset. *g*

Oops? Let's try that again. :-D

Even hanging up isn't the same!

I think they called it 'keyboard skills' when my nephew was taking it in school. My typing class had more manual than electric typewriters, so we had to switch around throughout the semester to give everyone a chance at the electrics!

I've been waiting for analog clocks to fade into history since I read that line in Hitchhiker's Guide about how earthlings "still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea." No sign of it happening anytime soon: the low-end ones are cheaper than digital clocks, and the high-end ones are classier than any digital clock you can think of.

One 'phrase' that's teetering on the brink of irrelevance: "YOU SPIN ME RIGHT ROUND BABY RIGHT ROUND, LIKE A... wtf is a record anyway?"

Speaking of which, what will replace the ancient riposte to the verbose: "Were you vaccinated with a phonograph needle?"

(The sheer number of explanatory footnotes for any Stephen King novel will be epic!)

There was apparently a major push for analog because it was felt (presumably by the usual cabal of conservatives) that digital was just too exact. (I own a pocket watch now (analog with Roman numerals) for when I can't use the phone--and there's another--and got into the digital conversation. Also the clockwise and the Roman numeral conversation, because people apparently only see those in movie copyright notices. Ha.) Hmmm. Just realized that the phrase "My hat's off to you!" is ineffective when almost no one neither Hasidic nor Amish actually wears a hat anymore.

Speaking of which, what will replace the ancient riposte to the verbose: "Were you vaccinated with a phonograph needle?"

Even "where's your off-switch?" is old hat. (Old hat! What does that mean? LOL) Now you'd be looking for their mute button. :-D

I wear a wristwatch most of the time. I don't need exactness. One of my watches doesn't even have numbers!

Roman numerals are impossible for me to take in at a glance - I need time to work them out. I wonder why they've stayed in use for so long?

On clocks and watches, at least, it's a marketing thing. Apparently clocks with Roman numerals look more expensive than ones with Arabic numberals, and using the incorrect IIII instead of IV is more visually balanced.

Clocks with Arabic numerals can seem so institutional. Schools, hospitals, offices, etc.

Hee, I'm trying to picture a digital grandfather clock! It would probably have a "ring tone" instead of chimes. :-)

And whatever happened to record shops?

on TV they used to say "don't touch that dial" to get you to keep watching. or even "stay tuned." and to get you to watch next week they tell you to "tune in next week." ~~same bat time, same bat channel.~~

No more dials, no more tuning. Push a button.

Holy remote control, Batman!

I reckon it'll probably persist with no thougt to its meaning, and eventually turn up as a question on QI ;-)

At some point we all had to learn what it meant, and I'm sure it was explained as "the way the hands go 'round on the clock."

Future kid: Bwuh? Clocks don't have hands!

Anyway, however it gets explained to kids in the future, I've learned that it gets very confusing when you're reaching down/under/where you can't see, trying to unfasten a very stubborn plastic nut holding the toilet seat you want to replace! I finally had to lie on my back and look up at it in order to determine which way was counter-clockwise. *g*

::nods:: like that wretched thing when you're driving with a trailer hooked up and you have to turn the wheel the wrong way to get it to go the way that you want it to go :-(

There's a perfectly good synonym for counter-clockwise, that predates the introduction of clocks: "widdershins." It's a term from Lowland Scots dialect.

Another approach to describing the direction of spin comes from the worlds of subatomic physics, mathematics and geometry, where the notion of "handedness" is expressed by the term "chirality."

Unfortunately, to make things perfectly clear to themselves, physicists refer to electron spin as either "up" or "down," which correlate roughly to "clockwise" and "anticlockwise."

They had better watch it, or the Three Weird Sisters from Shakespeare's "Macbeth" will get them.

Edited 2013-01-09 12:07 (UTC)

I think I've seen the term 'widdershins' in one of the Lord Peter Wimsey books. *Googles* Yup! Unlucky to walk about a church widdershins. I shall immediately begin employing this word! :-D

Speaking of trailers, movie trailers (aka previews) come before the movie now.

With so many devices going to a touch screen or being motion sensitive (like lights, faucets, and XBox Kinect), will "pushing your buttons" become as anachronistic as the Mix Tape?

I never would have thought of "pushing your buttons"! I wonder how long that sayings been around, now that I'm thinking about it. It must be fairly modern.

The passing of some technologies, or the geographic shift of some industries, also leaves behind traces in economic statistics, as well as in the language.

For example, US statistics about industrial production and exports, which are classified into four-digit Standard Industrial Classification Codes, formerly had dozens of categories for various kinds of shoe machinery. By the same token, the statistics that tracked employment trends assigned tracked all kinds of worker skills related to shoe manufacturing.

About 30 years ago, when the US shoe industry sailed offshore and the computer industry took off, a reform of the SIC codes took place to accommodate the changes. In 1997, statisticians, rolled out a more detailed six-digit North American Industry Classification System.

To give an example of two phrases that you still might hear, "a flash in the pan" and "hanging fire" both refer to malfunctions of muzzle-loading firearms. Though in fact, the hobbyists who build and use those muskets might still experience, and definitely understand, those events.

One bizarre regional term sometimes heard in England is "dropping a clanger." It refers to a bygone cooking recipe or meal practice in which a farm cook would prepare pastries filled with meat at one end and jam at the other. The field worker would eat the meat-filled part first, and then the jam-filled part for dessert. Dropping this clanger before lunch would mix up the two parts; and probably break the pastry as well, resulting in an unappetizing mess. Hence, "dropping a clanger" as a mistake.

Edited 2013-01-09 11:44 (UTC)

Fascinating stuff! I can't believe I've never wondered what a 'clanger' is.

My maternal grandmother worked in a shoe factory in the 1910s. :-)

Ha ha - now you get more new comments to this old post! :D

I was just thinking about the 'gift horse' one yesterday, but someone already mentioned it.

All those nauticalisms - so many I didn't even know they were nauticalisms! So they are already obsolete but persistent:

*Don't sweat the small stuff
*The devil to pay and no pitch hot
*Between the devil and the deep blue sea
*The bitter end

I'm sure there's lots more; that's just top of head.

For clockwise: You know, I filled the house with analog clocks just to make sure my kids would learn to tell time on analog as well as digital (didn't have to worry too much, the school still teaches time-telling on analog).

But clockwise and counter-clockwise will still persist in anything that turns, like screws and jar lids. I can't see us replacing the term; I bet we'll continue to say clockwise, even if the term gets corrupted and shortened along the way.

Also bet we hang onto analog displays, even if they are driven digitally! :D

Would you believe my schooling never included being taught to tell time? All of a sudden one day we're given a standardized test to take, and several of the questions involved reading the face of a clock. I just had to guess...and I obviously guessed wrong, because the teacher called my mother and said, "She doesn't know how to tell time!"

Mom had just assumed they would teach me. You would think!

Widdershins! I knew I'd come up with it. Predates clock faces. Now archaic, but maybe it will be revived once clock faces are archaic *g*

Already mentioned above. But if that gives us 'counter-clockwise', we're still lacking a 'clockwise' reference. Maybe counter-widdershins would work? :-D

A timely thought

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Here via 3W4DW

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I suspect this comment should go here instead of there--whoops

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Heh.

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Clockwise

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Obsolete phrases

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