• by Cory Treffiletti , Featured Contributor, September 28, 2016

We live in a period of amazing innovation and technological advancement progressing at an unbelievable rate these days. As a result, many of the phrases we grew up with are becoming quaint anachronisms.

My personal epiphany on this topic came last week. I was sitting in a coffee shop doing work and overhearing two baristas chatter about the baseball game from the night before.  Barista #1 mentioned that he’d “missed the game and taped it to watch later.” I found this to be a completely acceptable statement. However, Barista #2 asked, “What do you mean?”  Apparently the concept of taping something is far too old-school for someone who never lived in the age of the VCR and tapes.

Here are a few more dated concepts that kids these days will never fully understand:

-- Burning a CD has absolutely nothing to do with fire, and this generation will never even touch a CD.  It’s all digital all the time, and services like Apple Music and Spotify have literally killed the compact disc.  No more jewel boxes — and no more burning them to your computer.

-- Will your kids ever use speed dial?  Probably not, since there are literally zero items of technology that require a dial, much less a phone.  Everything is speedy, so speed dial is obsolete.

-- Speaking of phone terminology: When do you ever hang up on someone?  Your iPhone and Android phones are not hanging anywhere, so almost all uses of this term don’t make sense. Yet people still say it.  I love when people use terms mindlessly and with no background on why!

-- Do you roll down the window in your car?  I don’t -- and haven’t done so for years -- but people still use that phrase.  A few years ago you could still have a hand crank in a rental car, but I haven’t seen one in a long time.

-- Is your presentation a carbon copy of one you did previously?  Do you even know what a carbon copy is?  When was the last time you used carbon paper, and does anyone even make that stuff anymore?

-- When you prepare slides for a presentation at work, do you actually run them through a slide projector or an acetate machine, as we did in olden days?  Slides are an outdated term, but one that still has meaning in the age of Powerpoint and Keynote, because the term is still baked in.

There are probably more of these every day that pop up as we enter into a more digitized, socially enabled world.  The terminology of yesterday gets adopted in the form of an analogy to new situations, so people can more easily explain the new ways of doing things.  

What are some of your favorite outdated phrases? Which ones do you think will become outdated next?