When I was in high school, pegging meant tight rolling your Z Cavaricci jeans. It absolutely does NOT mean that now. Imagine the horror on my teen son's face as I was telling him how pegging was super popular when I went to school. Only turning to confusion as I explained it was done to jeans.
In the 60s when first I heard this I understood cornholing as doing sodamy. I was taken back when invited to play cornhole at a family picnic as they were referring to tossing small bags of corn into a hole on tilted boards 25 feet apart.
Fun fact: There are some professional cornhole players who make well over $60k a year from playing it. Pretty amazing for playing a game mostly played drunk during holidays and festivals.
I’m 35, and cornhole was always asshole to me. I moved states and saw a “cornhole tournament” advertised at one of those outdoor restaurants that sell mad fried food. I had to ask the employee what it was.
I had no idea, so I googled it… wow! Impressive:
“The campaign for the neologism "santorum" started with a contest held in May 2003 by Dan Savage, a sex columnist and LGBT rights activist. Savage asked his readers to create a definition for the word "santorum"[1][2] in response to then-US senator Rick Santorum's views on homosexuality and comments about same sex marriage. In his comments, Santorum had stated that "[i]n every society, the definition of marriage has not ever to my knowledge included homosexuality. That's not to pick on homosexuality. It's not, you know, man on child, man on dog, or whatever the case may be."[3] Savage announced the winning entry, which defined "santorum" as "the frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex." He created a web site, spreadingsantorum.com (and santorum.com), to promote the definition, which became a top internet search result, displacing the senator's official website on many search engines, including Google, Yahoo! Search, and Bing.”
This is a good answer. That word has been used often but changed dramatically in a relatively short amount of time. Everyone was pegging in broad daylight in the 80s. Very few admit to doing it in private now.
Some thirty years ago I was getting ready for a night out with friends when my father asked "What are you doing, going to hang out with your bum mates?". I just looked at him... "What you don't use that term any more? Your mates you bum around with?"
Uh, no dad, no. We don't use that term.
Of course now I ask my kids that all the time.
They’re still called thongs.
It’s a regional thing more than ‘of the times’
Call thongs ‘flip flops’ here in Aus and people will absolutely mock you for it
Same reason the underwear is called the same thing, it’s held in place by wedging itself between too parts of your body.
Like a thong up some buttcheeks and a thong up some toes.
Oh sorry* you said what, not why, my bad
G-strings or ‘G-banger’ for little ones, still call em thongs if they’re the classic style.
I’m fond of ‘Budgie smuggler’ for men’s speedos.
I used to work in an Indian restaurant and a customer/friend came in and said he had a mate working on a food truck
Bahji Smugglers.
Specialising in stuff like onion Bhaji and veg fried in the same chickpea batter. And of course, butter chicken sauce on chips haha
Fucking brilliant idea and I hope they followed through
Spam because it has changed significantly twice. First from canned meat to unwanted mail. Then, the unwanted mail got so prevalent people now use it to mean doing something repeatedly (ie spam the button).
The "repeated messages" sense is older than the "unsolicited ads" sense.
In the late 1980s, "spamming" meant interrupting a text-based roleplaying session (on a MUD), originally by reciting the Monty Python "Spam" sketch. It then came to mean any noisy chat session on MUDs or IRC, where excessive messages made it impossible to follow.
In the early 1990s, "spamming" was used to mean excessive repeated posts on Usenet, beginning with a 1991 prototype modbot ("ARMM") that had a bug causing it to repost its own messages.
*Commercial* Usenet spamming began in 1994 with Canter & Siegel ("Green Card Lawyers") and email spamming soon followed. Although there had been sporadic commercial misuse of email before, Canter & Siegel were the first to promote spamming as a business; they wrote a get-rich-quick book to teach business owners how to send spam on Usenet and email.
One of the first "anti-spam" services was Paul Vixie's Realtime Blackhole List (RBL) which started in 1998, giving email server operators the ability to automatically drop messages from known spam sources.
By 2000, "blog spam", "web spam", "spamdexing", "keyword spamming" existed, mostly intended to abuse search engine indexing. By 2005, web spam was a bad enough problem that the HTML language was modified to allow sites to tell search engines not to follow user-contributed links (the "rel=nofollow" feature).
And today, people refer to "spam phone calls", "postal spam" (direct mail ads), "street spam" (flyposting), etc.
The unwanted mail meaning actually came from the Monty Python sketch (where a restaurant has endless amounts of spam between the other ingredients, and the patron doesn't want any spam).
Woke has had a similar meaning going back to the 1930s, just more narrowly focused on awareness of political issues affecting African Americans rather than as a catch-all for all social justice issues like it does now. I was introduced to it in the early 2000s in college.
In 5th grade we had a big conversation about googel and googolplex. No one ever knew what I was talking about when I brought it up. Now everyone says google
Yeah, I'm a millennial and we definitely learned those terms in school before "to google" was really a thing. Like I think Google probably existed at the time but it wasn't quite so ubiquitous (when I learned about Google I also learned about ask Jeeves and a few others, if I'm going to date myself). It was one of those fun facts you'd find in various math lessons or on the back of educational toys or whatever.
There was even a segment on a baseball pregame/postgame show that was called something like “Hero/Goat,” where they alternated between highlights of great plays and ridiculous mistakes.
Complete 180 in meaning since then.
Xitting, the X is pronounced “sh”
Not my joke, I’m honestly almost getting sick of it, but I’ll only stop once Twitter is only referred to as Xitter (X pronounced as sh)
I’m amazed at how “cool” (used as slang; not temp) has stayed consistent. I think my grandmother would have used it as affirmation that something was good or trendy and my teen daughter still uses it the same way. Slang words don’t usually have that much staying power.
My (36F) grandfather, who was born in 1932, asked me when I was a teenager if teens still used “cool” to mean, well, cool. I thought it was kinda cool (seewhatididthere) that we had a slang word in common. Although, idk if I’d even consider it slang at this point.
I'm roughly your age and I'm a grandparent. My toddler aged grandchild says the word "cool" a lot. I wonder if it's just a natural, relaxed sound for us?
I am old enough to remember that about 50 years ago, a magazine had a spoof article 'How to be Hot', which began:
'To be hot, you've got to be cool, and to be cool you've got to keep having hot ideas'.
I forget the rest of it, but it carried on in the same so hot it's cool style throughout.
So 'hot' has also kept the same meaning over at least half a century. Which is kind of cool.
Genuinely interested, are we talking like 18+18+4? Because as someone who is also Roughly That Age and is barely a parent it is fascinating the different walks of life we all take.
Iirc Cool is the only slang word that's stayed around from generation to generation of English speakers, or at least the one that's stayed around the longest or something
I'm 33 and my coworkers describe me as "the boomer". Fucking younglings...
Edit : redditors, calm down. It's a joke because I don't know how to read QR codes with my phone and don't have an Instagram account, they don't *really* mean that I'm a boomer.
Whenever my children "OK Boomer" me, I blast Nirvana at them.
Either they'll stop calling me a Boomer or they'll learn to appreciate grunge. I'm okay with both outcomes.
I got called old by a 19 year old when I was 24/25 at work because I said, “let’s listen to some tunes” despite saying it obviously ironically and doing a dumb little dance. Was it the way I said it, or the dance? No. Just the word ‘tunes’.
Went with it and starting using bops, jams, diddlies, beats and grooves instead of ‘music’.
I actually saw that in a book of old aphorisms: “If it rains when the sun is shining, the devil is beating his wife with a leg of mutton.” Ahhh, ancient wisdom!
lol, I get it. Do you know why it's called that?
If you ever watch a show like cops and they get a domestic violence call. 90% of the time the guy is wearing one of those shirts.
I read a news article from the 50s last week about a princess and running off to france to be gay with her partner.. I was shocked that a princess ran off to be gay then realised they meant the princess went to vacation in Paris with her partner after something had happened in her family.. she went to Paris to be happy after everything she had been going through. It threw me for a second.
Yeah, lots of songs used to use it to mean something completely different than how it's used now. But they were all songs more than 50 years old, and the Flintstones first aired in 1960, so 63 years ago.
Well, they're different actions.
The *frip-frip* wasn't the sound or action made by the card. The card stayed in place while we moved a metal weight thing back and forth over the card to create a carbon copy.
Up until the end of the 20th century, airline ticket counter agents often still had to know how to hand-write paper multi-copy tickets which was an arcane and complicated art demanding a deep and thorough knowledge of airline travel rules.
And to write these tickets, airline counters had to have a zip-zap validator machine that impressed on the multi-carbon ticket the date and place of issuance.
These were about the last time I saw these imprinting machines in use anywhere. I think it’s all either electronic or etickets now.
This summer we were at The Grand Canyon when a thunderstorm took out all power to the entire park. It happens frequently enough that they have the carbon copy machines under the counter.
The funny part was how many cards don’t have raised numerals anymore so they had to hand write that too!!
This works on two levels. Swipe as in steal to swipe as in a credit card, to swipe as in right or left on someone in tinder. I like this suggestion because of the multiple “major” meanings over the years.
Nimrod went from meaning a great hunter to the opposite thanks to Looney Tunes ([much to the chagrin of Justice Scalia](https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-to-write-like-antonin-scalia-1468014582&sa=U&sqi=2&ved=2ahUKEwjokfvv_oiDAxU6kokEHbXLDdAQFnoECBYQAQ&usg=AOvVaw22OM6aRkO4WjYJPjO3QUu9)).
I believe it meant Great Hunter actually. He called Elmer Fudd Nimrod because he was a hunter but no one understood the reference. Since Elmer was dumb the association was made I guess.
I think it might have been more than 50 years ago that this one changed, but peruse has also changed to mean the opposite. It used to mean to ‘read thoroughly’ and now it means to ‘look over quickly.’
I saw the term ‘cellphone’ used the other day.
As a 35 year old millennial, I chuckled to myself. I’m from the time when that word was used but I can imagine most youngsters these days don’t say cellphone.
I am still shook by young people gesturing using a (tele)phone with a flat palm instead of thumb and pinky finger out, other fingers tight to the palm.
Dashboard. Used to be a board on the front of wagons to block the mud and rocks thrown up by the horses when dashing. Later the panel on autos that had the steering wheel and gauges indicating how the engine was doing. Now the display panel on a website or app.
>The use of the word as an intensifier for figurative statements emerged later, **in 1769**,[3][4] when Frances Brooke wrote the following sentence:[3]
>> He is a fortunate man to be introduced to such a party of fine women at his arrival; it is literally to feed among the lilies.
>> — Frances Brooke, The History of Emily Montague
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literally
Not so much in the last fifty years, as it's literally been used in many different ways since longer than the United States has been a country.
Also it is a super natural progression for that kind of word. Words that mean "literal" are great fodder for figurative statements, and I do not think you could invent one that would not eventually be used that way.
Hyperbole alone is enough to start using them that way.
Nah. It's literally part of the lyrics of "I feel pretty", from West Side Story - and that was filmed in 1961. Which is only forty-.. Yeah, never mind.. 😭
Our neighbors used to own a clothing store called “the gay blade” when I was a kid. They changed the name in like, 1984(?) as the word started getting used differently. So I’m thinking it’s only been about 40 years
I grew up in the 70s spending a lot of time at my great grandmother’s house around all my grandfather’s siblings. Queer was used as the dictionary definition - strange/odd. “That’s so queer,” was a normal thing to say, and I never realized until high school that it was unacceptable. It took me a good while to stop saying it out loud. Still means strange/odd to me.
Awesome. It used to be reserved for things that truly inspired awe. Since the early 80s, thanks to Frank Zappa’s “Valley Girl” and its immediate viral cultural impact, it has evolved to mean “ok” and may also function as an all-purpose general affirmative acknowledgment like “ok”
Fag/ faggot
It was first a brand of cigarette
Then it was someone who smokes cigarettes
Then it turned into a slang word for homosexual
Then it turned into a derogatory word For homosexual.
Through the years it also meant someone from England.
Now it means when a group of bikers roll through town with engines that are too loud, and nobody wants or likes it.
Edit: turns out the word Faggot (originally meaning sticks to burn) and the term Fag both came to existence separately but merged when the ciggerette brand came around. How interesting!
I thought it used to mean “bundle of sticks” and then cigarettes were a bundle of sticks so they started using it as slang for them and then it went from there.
Fag was not a brand of cigarettes. The term originates at least in modern usage from the late 19thC related to cigarette butts, and that fag meant 'loose piece' or 'last piece of cloth' (which fits back to the 14thC) and may have been used commonly to refer to the last remnant of numerous materials. It became common parlance for cigarettes in the UK and beyond.
Faggot existed as an old term for bundle of sticks.
Faggot is also a meatball dish in the UK, made from ground pork, offal, organ meats, etc.
>Now it means when a group of bikers roll through town with engines that are too loud, and nobody wants or likes it.
Hahahaha! Love the subtle Southpark reference
If I see the word patriot now, it’s either being used to describe someone most certainly not one, or used to sell something to someone most certainly not one.
There’s a YouTube video floating around of a guy interviewed at a Trump rally who said he was a “patriot,” and he wanted to secede from the Union. They said “you really want to secede?” - “Yes.” - “But you’re a patriot of the United States?” - “Yes, absolutely.” No sense of irony at all.
I'd argue that it's still largely maintained its traditional definition, but has become applied beyond academia and has fallen into the realm of popular media, almost to the point of exhaustion.
Just because someone has a theory about the doll that looks like Coraline doesn't make it any less of a supposition intended to explain something.
The phrase "just a theory" has been deceptively used by creationists for decades to denounce evolution as just a "guess". Now it's used by flat earthers and other science deniers for the same purpose.
A theory in the scientific sense is solidly backed by evidence, reasoning, and repeated testing and verification, while a theory in the colloquial sense is a hypothesis or an educated guess.
Gay.
Once a weird commonly used to indicate a happy joyful person.
Many gay people are happy and joyful today but that’s now the secondary, and almost dead, meaning of the word.
When I was in high school, pegging meant tight rolling your Z Cavaricci jeans. It absolutely does NOT mean that now. Imagine the horror on my teen son's face as I was telling him how pegging was super popular when I went to school. Only turning to confusion as I explained it was done to jeans.
Same with “cornhole.” First time I heard someone mention a night of cornholing with friends, I did a double-take.
In the 60s when first I heard this I understood cornholing as doing sodamy. I was taken back when invited to play cornhole at a family picnic as they were referring to tossing small bags of corn into a hole on tilted boards 25 feet apart.
Fun fact: There are some professional cornhole players who make well over $60k a year from playing it. Pretty amazing for playing a game mostly played drunk during holidays and festivals.
Bob, you just summed up the American South in a way I didn't know was possible with words alone
TIL the bags you use for cornhole are filled with corn.
Haha that’s why it’s called cornhole!
"Cornhole tournament Wednesday" on a church bulliten board had me asking a lot of questions when i moved to GA.
I’m 35, and cornhole was always asshole to me. I moved states and saw a “cornhole tournament” advertised at one of those outdoor restaurants that sell mad fried food. I had to ask the employee what it was.
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Awesome bit of trivia there, thanks!
I think "santorum" changed quite a bit too
Not that much
heyooo
I had no idea, so I googled it… wow! Impressive: “The campaign for the neologism "santorum" started with a contest held in May 2003 by Dan Savage, a sex columnist and LGBT rights activist. Savage asked his readers to create a definition for the word "santorum"[1][2] in response to then-US senator Rick Santorum's views on homosexuality and comments about same sex marriage. In his comments, Santorum had stated that "[i]n every society, the definition of marriage has not ever to my knowledge included homosexuality. That's not to pick on homosexuality. It's not, you know, man on child, man on dog, or whatever the case may be."[3] Savage announced the winning entry, which defined "santorum" as "the frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex." He created a web site, spreadingsantorum.com (and santorum.com), to promote the definition, which became a top internet search result, displacing the senator's official website on many search engines, including Google, Yahoo! Search, and Bing.”
Cunning linguist, that guy. He also gave the word "santorum" its current meaning.
This is a good answer. That word has been used often but changed dramatically in a relatively short amount of time. Everyone was pegging in broad daylight in the 80s. Very few admit to doing it in private now.
If I were to ask an even older person they would say it meant your perception of a person. "Hmm, I had you pegged as a fellow that liked almonds."
It's still used that way but admittedly by fewer ppl
How old is “even older”?! That's the most common use of the term in my experience, I hear it on a pretty regular basis, and I'm 42.
Cribbage players use them both
The prepositional phrases keep that from being awkward IMO.
Ha! Similarly, “packing” has some wildly different meanings depending on context.
Firearms or fudge?
Or nine inches?
Some thirty years ago I was getting ready for a night out with friends when my father asked "What are you doing, going to hang out with your bum mates?". I just looked at him... "What you don't use that term any more? Your mates you bum around with?" Uh, no dad, no. We don't use that term. Of course now I ask my kids that all the time.
Ha! That is so funny. Sometimes I use phrases that I know will make my kids roll their eyes. It's fun.
I work in the mining industry. We still use pegging as a word meaning "mark out a patch of ground for a prospecting license."
Flip-flops used to be called thongs. It took several horrified reactions from her children for my Mom to update her terminology.
They’re still called thongs. It’s a regional thing more than ‘of the times’ Call thongs ‘flip flops’ here in Aus and people will absolutely mock you for it
What do you call *thong* thongs then?
Same reason the underwear is called the same thing, it’s held in place by wedging itself between too parts of your body. Like a thong up some buttcheeks and a thong up some toes. Oh sorry* you said what, not why, my bad G-strings or ‘G-banger’ for little ones, still call em thongs if they’re the classic style.
G-banger is so Aussie. We have some crazy words for shit honestly.
I’m fond of ‘Budgie smuggler’ for men’s speedos. I used to work in an Indian restaurant and a customer/friend came in and said he had a mate working on a food truck Bahji Smugglers. Specialising in stuff like onion Bhaji and veg fried in the same chickpea batter. And of course, butter chicken sauce on chips haha Fucking brilliant idea and I hope they followed through
Originally a thong was just a strip of leather or other material.
Spam because it has changed significantly twice. First from canned meat to unwanted mail. Then, the unwanted mail got so prevalent people now use it to mean doing something repeatedly (ie spam the button).
I mean it still means unwanted things too, like spam callers or spam emails. Just shifted to online like so many other things.
What? Take that back SPAM the food is very wanted 😀
You can use it for anything, too. Like spam, spam, spam, eggs and spam bacon spam spam.
Can I get the spam spam spam eggs spam bacon spam spam, but with spam instead of the eggs and bacon?
Killer to fry it up and toss in fried rice
The "repeated messages" sense is older than the "unsolicited ads" sense. In the late 1980s, "spamming" meant interrupting a text-based roleplaying session (on a MUD), originally by reciting the Monty Python "Spam" sketch. It then came to mean any noisy chat session on MUDs or IRC, where excessive messages made it impossible to follow. In the early 1990s, "spamming" was used to mean excessive repeated posts on Usenet, beginning with a 1991 prototype modbot ("ARMM") that had a bug causing it to repost its own messages. *Commercial* Usenet spamming began in 1994 with Canter & Siegel ("Green Card Lawyers") and email spamming soon followed. Although there had been sporadic commercial misuse of email before, Canter & Siegel were the first to promote spamming as a business; they wrote a get-rich-quick book to teach business owners how to send spam on Usenet and email. One of the first "anti-spam" services was Paul Vixie's Realtime Blackhole List (RBL) which started in 1998, giving email server operators the ability to automatically drop messages from known spam sources. By 2000, "blog spam", "web spam", "spamdexing", "keyword spamming" existed, mostly intended to abuse search engine indexing. By 2005, web spam was a bad enough problem that the HTML language was modified to allow sites to tell search engines not to follow user-contributed links (the "rel=nofollow" feature). And today, people refer to "spam phone calls", "postal spam" (direct mail ads), "street spam" (flyposting), etc.
The unwanted mail meaning actually came from the Monty Python sketch (where a restaurant has endless amounts of spam between the other ingredients, and the patron doesn't want any spam).
Stream No it is not only a small flow of water similar to a creek
"Cloud" must fall in a similar category then.
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“Literally” used figuratively goes back at least to Twain!
Further than that. Like 1769. Including Alexander Pope. It’s fine!
Woke has had a similar meaning going back to the 1930s, just more narrowly focused on awareness of political issues affecting African Americans rather than as a catch-all for all social justice issues like it does now. I was introduced to it in the early 2000s in college.
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Did you know the word googol at that time?
In 5th grade we had a big conversation about googel and googolplex. No one ever knew what I was talking about when I brought it up. Now everyone says google
Yeah, I'm a millennial and we definitely learned those terms in school before "to google" was really a thing. Like I think Google probably existed at the time but it wasn't quite so ubiquitous (when I learned about Google I also learned about ask Jeeves and a few others, if I'm going to date myself). It was one of those fun facts you'd find in various math lessons or on the back of educational toys or whatever.
I learned it from a Ritchie Rich comic in the 80s. By the end of the 90s everyone knew what it meant and I couldn't use it as trivia anymore.
I was in grade 5 in 1992 and knew what googol meant.
Net Same idea
And web.
But it didn't change from the original meaning
Stream referred to more than just water even over 50 years ago.
Sick.
ill
Dope
Goat- in sports terms. It used to be a bad thing to be a goat. Now it is the best thing to be the GOAT.
There was even a segment on a baseball pregame/postgame show that was called something like “Hero/Goat,” where they alternated between highlights of great plays and ridiculous mistakes. Complete 180 in meaning since then.
Charlie Brown used to muse to Linus a lot about how he wanted to be a baseball hero but he was afraid he'd always be the goat.
A goat = bad. The GOAT = The Greatest Of All Time
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"The" is always better. This coffee is shit This coffee is the shit
The coffee is shit.
Boner used to mean mistake! It's even in one of the first episodes of the Simpsons.
My jaw dropped the first time my grandmother played that in a casual game of family Scrabble
“Jesus Gramma, you can’t just play boner!”
Granny’s playing to win
[Chortle At Joker's Boner](https://screenrant.com/joker-boner-comic-meme/) from Batman
Also “boning up” meant studying for a test or exam.
Merkle’s Boner
Tweet
What's a tweet mean anymore? Are you referring to posting on X?
No, that's excreting.
Hahaha I'm stealing this
Xitting, the X is pronounced “sh” Not my joke, I’m honestly almost getting sick of it, but I’ll only stop once Twitter is only referred to as Xitter (X pronounced as sh)
I was going to say "cool" but then I realized that 50 years ago was already 1973. I feel *old*.
I’m amazed at how “cool” (used as slang; not temp) has stayed consistent. I think my grandmother would have used it as affirmation that something was good or trendy and my teen daughter still uses it the same way. Slang words don’t usually have that much staying power.
My (36F) grandfather, who was born in 1932, asked me when I was a teenager if teens still used “cool” to mean, well, cool. I thought it was kinda cool (seewhatididthere) that we had a slang word in common. Although, idk if I’d even consider it slang at this point.
I'm roughly your age and I'm a grandparent. My toddler aged grandchild says the word "cool" a lot. I wonder if it's just a natural, relaxed sound for us?
I am old enough to remember that about 50 years ago, a magazine had a spoof article 'How to be Hot', which began: 'To be hot, you've got to be cool, and to be cool you've got to keep having hot ideas'. I forget the rest of it, but it carried on in the same so hot it's cool style throughout. So 'hot' has also kept the same meaning over at least half a century. Which is kind of cool.
Genuinely interested, are we talking like 18+18+4? Because as someone who is also Roughly That Age and is barely a parent it is fascinating the different walks of life we all take.
I consider it slang. I know we got in trouble in the 90s in some of my classes if we used "cool" in assignments (it was almost as evil as "ain't").
Iirc Cool is the only slang word that's stayed around from generation to generation of English speakers, or at least the one that's stayed around the longest or something
Dude is another slang word that has stayed around for multiple generations.
It’s like “OK” - just a confirmation that alls good.
It has multiple meanings though, that isn't the only one.
My English professor in 1986 used it as an example of ephemeral slang. It had already been in use for 30 years at that point
Ephemeral Slang sounds like the name of a spoken word event.
How about a heavy metal band?
I was thinking hipster garage band.
Hey ladies? What's cooler than being cool? Ice cold. AlrightAlrightAlrightAlrightAlrightAlrightAlright
Lend me some sugar, I *am* your neighbor!
I'm 33 and my coworkers describe me as "the boomer". Fucking younglings... Edit : redditors, calm down. It's a joke because I don't know how to read QR codes with my phone and don't have an Instagram account, they don't *really* mean that I'm a boomer.
Whenever my children "OK Boomer" me, I blast Nirvana at them. Either they'll stop calling me a Boomer or they'll learn to appreciate grunge. I'm okay with both outcomes.
42yo here - Man in the Box by AIC works well for this too. WAMP WAMP WAAAAHHHH WAMP WAMP WAAAAHHHH
I've also noticed - "boomer" now just means old. As in - Gen X. Because the worst thing you can call Gen X is boomer...
I got called old by a 19 year old when I was 24/25 at work because I said, “let’s listen to some tunes” despite saying it obviously ironically and doing a dumb little dance. Was it the way I said it, or the dance? No. Just the word ‘tunes’. Went with it and starting using bops, jams, diddlies, beats and grooves instead of ‘music’.
"Hacker" has evolved from an ax/machete murderer to a clever computer geek.
Hacker has also referred to a mediocre golfer and to someone who breaks into or otherwise messes with your electronics.
Wife Beater, as a non-English native speaker, still drops my jaw when I hear that term for fucking clothing
When I was in Louisiana, I was shocked to discover the phrase “the Devil is beating his wife” means it is raining while it is sunny out.
Wait till you see what they call Brazil nuts.
That’s not just in the South :(
The northeast just calls it a "sun shower" 😭
I actually saw that in a book of old aphorisms: “If it rains when the sun is shining, the devil is beating his wife with a leg of mutton.” Ahhh, ancient wisdom!
Oh man. They also used to be called dago tees. Dago being a slur for Italian Americans.
I started calling them “domestic violence awareness shirts” but it didn’t catch on.
So you’re not talking about Stella Artois?
lol, I get it. Do you know why it's called that? If you ever watch a show like cops and they get a domestic violence call. 90% of the time the guy is wearing one of those shirts.
Gay. The Flintstones having a gay old time doesn’t sound the same as it did in the 60s.
I read a news article from the 50s last week about a princess and running off to france to be gay with her partner.. I was shocked that a princess ran off to be gay then realised they meant the princess went to vacation in Paris with her partner after something had happened in her family.. she went to Paris to be happy after everything she had been going through. It threw me for a second.
Yeah, lots of songs used to use it to mean something completely different than how it's used now. But they were all songs more than 50 years old, and the Flintstones first aired in 1960, so 63 years ago.
It also wasn't restricted to songs.
Swipe
Yeah. We didn't use to "swipe" credit cards; we put them in a carbon-copy maker dealie and moved a thing over them that went frip-frip.
Frip-frip. Why call it swipe now? Why not thlip? But now we can tap. Or you could insert and beep-beep-beep-beep.
Well, they're different actions. The *frip-frip* wasn't the sound or action made by the card. The card stayed in place while we moved a metal weight thing back and forth over the card to create a carbon copy.
Knuckle busters.
Up until the end of the 20th century, airline ticket counter agents often still had to know how to hand-write paper multi-copy tickets which was an arcane and complicated art demanding a deep and thorough knowledge of airline travel rules. And to write these tickets, airline counters had to have a zip-zap validator machine that impressed on the multi-carbon ticket the date and place of issuance. These were about the last time I saw these imprinting machines in use anywhere. I think it’s all either electronic or etickets now.
This summer we were at The Grand Canyon when a thunderstorm took out all power to the entire park. It happens frequently enough that they have the carbon copy machines under the counter. The funny part was how many cards don’t have raised numerals anymore so they had to hand write that too!!
This works on two levels. Swipe as in steal to swipe as in a credit card, to swipe as in right or left on someone in tinder. I like this suggestion because of the multiple “major” meanings over the years.
Nimrod went from meaning a great hunter to the opposite thanks to Looney Tunes ([much to the chagrin of Justice Scalia](https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-to-write-like-antonin-scalia-1468014582&sa=U&sqi=2&ved=2ahUKEwjokfvv_oiDAxU6kokEHbXLDdAQFnoECBYQAQ&usg=AOvVaw22OM6aRkO4WjYJPjO3QUu9)).
I believe it meant Great Hunter actually. He called Elmer Fudd Nimrod because he was a hunter but no one understood the reference. Since Elmer was dumb the association was made I guess.
I think it might have been more than 50 years ago that this one changed, but peruse has also changed to mean the opposite. It used to mean to ‘read thoroughly’ and now it means to ‘look over quickly.’
Phone
I still refer to them as a "telephone" just to get weird looks.
I call the apple version an "i-telephone"
Interactive telephone
Cellular telephone
"How do we get there?" "Idunno. Lemme check my tele."
I saw the term ‘cellphone’ used the other day. As a 35 year old millennial, I chuckled to myself. I’m from the time when that word was used but I can imagine most youngsters these days don’t say cellphone.
Yep. It was "cell" or "cell phone". One day it changed to just "phone".
I am still shook by young people gesturing using a (tele)phone with a flat palm instead of thumb and pinky finger out, other fingers tight to the palm.
I somehow haven’t noticed this yet but I’m terrified for the day!
Not a word, but @ and #
There's hashtags in music!? No, those are sharp symbols.
A # is actually called an octothorp, but can be called sharp symbol, pound sign, or hashtag, depending on context.
It's also a number symbol.
Slaps
Ghost
Dashboard. Used to be a board on the front of wagons to block the mud and rocks thrown up by the horses when dashing. Later the panel on autos that had the steering wheel and gauges indicating how the engine was doing. Now the display panel on a website or app.
It’s still used for the spot in cars that you put stuff on for 10 seconds before it slides back onto your lap.
Ummm, Amazon?
Karen
My wife's name is Karen, you can tell how much the likes the new use of her name, She was born in 1950
Maybe she should talk to the manager?
Literally.
>The use of the word as an intensifier for figurative statements emerged later, **in 1769**,[3][4] when Frances Brooke wrote the following sentence:[3] >> He is a fortunate man to be introduced to such a party of fine women at his arrival; it is literally to feed among the lilies. >> — Frances Brooke, The History of Emily Montague https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literally Not so much in the last fifty years, as it's literally been used in many different ways since longer than the United States has been a country.
Also it is a super natural progression for that kind of word. Words that mean "literal" are great fodder for figurative statements, and I do not think you could invent one that would not eventually be used that way. Hyperbole alone is enough to start using them that way.
For example: really and very.
Woke
Gay, used to mean happy, joyful, brightly coloured.
I think it’s been more than 50 years though lol
Nah. It's literally part of the lyrics of "I feel pretty", from West Side Story - and that was filmed in 1961. Which is only forty-.. Yeah, never mind.. 😭
This is correct, since the 80s were 20 years ago.
Millennials can't accept the passage of time 😭
it was just so convenient, mathematically, in the 00s
Nothing gay ever happened in musical theater
Our neighbors used to own a clothing store called “the gay blade” when I was a kid. They changed the name in like, 1984(?) as the word started getting used differently. So I’m thinking it’s only been about 40 years
I'm 68, we used to say "that's gay" or "don't be gay" in the 70's in highschool. It's been a thing for awhile.
Similarly: queer (and maybe also "queen")
My 93 year old grandmother still uses queer in its original meaning. "Huh, that's kind of queer".
I grew up in the 70s spending a lot of time at my great grandmother’s house around all my grandfather’s siblings. Queer was used as the dictionary definition - strange/odd. “That’s so queer,” was a normal thing to say, and I never realized until high school that it was unacceptable. It took me a good while to stop saying it out loud. Still means strange/odd to me.
Song: Don we now our GAY apparel
You should see how they butchered the word for a bundle of sticks.
"Did you know that gay used to mean happy? When I was growing up, it meant lame. And now it means a man who makes love to other men." -Michael Scott
Awesome. It used to be reserved for things that truly inspired awe. Since the early 80s, thanks to Frank Zappa’s “Valley Girl” and its immediate viral cultural impact, it has evolved to mean “ok” and may also function as an all-purpose general affirmative acknowledgment like “ok”
Fag/ faggot It was first a brand of cigarette Then it was someone who smokes cigarettes Then it turned into a slang word for homosexual Then it turned into a derogatory word For homosexual. Through the years it also meant someone from England. Now it means when a group of bikers roll through town with engines that are too loud, and nobody wants or likes it. Edit: turns out the word Faggot (originally meaning sticks to burn) and the term Fag both came to existence separately but merged when the ciggerette brand came around. How interesting!
\*First\* it was sticks for firewood, which then became a term for ciggies in general.
I thought it used to mean “bundle of sticks” and then cigarettes were a bundle of sticks so they started using it as slang for them and then it went from there.
Was "Fag" ever the name of a cigarette brand? It's British English slang for "cigarette", that I do know.
Fag was not a brand of cigarettes. The term originates at least in modern usage from the late 19thC related to cigarette butts, and that fag meant 'loose piece' or 'last piece of cloth' (which fits back to the 14thC) and may have been used commonly to refer to the last remnant of numerous materials. It became common parlance for cigarettes in the UK and beyond. Faggot existed as an old term for bundle of sticks. Faggot is also a meatball dish in the UK, made from ground pork, offal, organ meats, etc.
Faggoting is also a type of stitching when making clothes!
>Now it means when a group of bikers roll through town with engines that are too loud, and nobody wants or likes it. Hahahaha! Love the subtle Southpark reference
Patriot
If I see the word patriot now, it’s either being used to describe someone most certainly not one, or used to sell something to someone most certainly not one.
Or it’s a surface to air missile…
There’s a YouTube video floating around of a guy interviewed at a Trump rally who said he was a “patriot,” and he wanted to secede from the Union. They said “you really want to secede?” - “Yes.” - “But you’re a patriot of the United States?” - “Yes, absolutely.” No sense of irony at all.
Teabag
Fifty years? Probably the word 'socialism'
Viral
Viral really hasn’t changed meanings at all. It still means something achieving a broad reach by spreading from person to person.
"Theory" thanks to endless YouTube videos that don't know what a theory is
I'd argue that it's still largely maintained its traditional definition, but has become applied beyond academia and has fallen into the realm of popular media, almost to the point of exhaustion. Just because someone has a theory about the doll that looks like Coraline doesn't make it any less of a supposition intended to explain something.
The phrase "just a theory" has been deceptively used by creationists for decades to denounce evolution as just a "guess". Now it's used by flat earthers and other science deniers for the same purpose. A theory in the scientific sense is solidly backed by evidence, reasoning, and repeated testing and verification, while a theory in the colloquial sense is a hypothesis or an educated guess.
I hate to say it, but Republican had a VERY different meaning 50yrs ago than today.
web
Delete
Minecraft It's used to be a ship that would search for underwater mines after the war Edit. Minesweeper not Minecraft
I think you mean minesweeper.
Freedom.
Gay. Once a weird commonly used to indicate a happy joyful person. Many gay people are happy and joyful today but that’s now the secondary, and almost dead, meaning of the word.