Gone but remembered.

[paul]

This is just a little something for fun. Or not. It's up to y'all.

We have reached the age where "dishwater blonde" is no longer an appropriate adjective in this day of mechanized kitchens and "sounds like a broken record" is almost officially a dead reference.
For some reason this makes me unconscionably sad.
I wasn't alive when Sinatra was singing on vinyl, but i get any reference to 'ole' Blue Eyes'. I came of age during the eighties, when freight trains were long since romanticized, but i knew immediately what "bindlestiff" meant when i saw it in print.
The reason i bring this up is this: i started to write the phrase "sounds like a broken record" in an essay, and i seriously considered changing it to "sounds like a scratched CD", which is probably perfectly current, but doesn't have that syllabic resonance, either reading it or for those of us that can imagine both sounds.
I'm not giving out grumbly olde folke talk, and new phrases will always replace the new...
So, to wit- what's outdated now? What common phrases, etc are we going to need to update or trash completely?
Seriously, this may help to keep me in touch...

[Chuck Messer]

I think only the terminally brain-dead don't know what a "broken record" means. After all, the current sound effect that is the equivalent of screeching tires or BOING! is the sound of a needle being dragged across a record.

Maybe some more detailed references would be harder for younger folk to connect with, but I think broken record still works.

Now, if you want to be obscure, you'd use phraseology like, "Allright you rakehells, hoydens and ne'er-do-wells, knock it off, or it'll be a mulcting for alla ya!"

Of course, the look on people's faces would be priceless. If you could see them.

Chuck

[paul]

Thing is, i talk like that on occasion. Like our patron, i have a host of elder curses and putdowns, not that they get it, but it serves to keep me in touch with that past. I had started a list of those sayings i mentioned, but apparantly i mislaid it.

I think i'm thinking of not so much archaic or obscure words, but colloquialisms that are simply out of their time.

I once called a rude old man a "magnanimous poltroon". He was so startled, he laughed his head off. Wasn't quite the effect i was looking for.

[Davey C]

I've got a lot of those too, thanks mostly to my mom, and of course Wodehouse, from whom I've pinched "deleterious young slab of damnation" as my all-time favorite smack nugget.

[Hathor]

"Olive" complexion should go by the wayside, too. Especially when there's a whole palette ranging from salty sweet toffee to BABYSHIT BRONZE out there. Besides, most children think of the sickly green color first...

[Hathor]

"Google" Brown, Boy Detective...

[paul]

I remember Encyclopedia Brown.
That was after i was reading Sherlok H. Pretty good, as i recall.

[robochrist]

Because my former girlfriend was Russian I am surrounded by Russians. Russia is a million years behind in pop music. They listen to stuff that sounds like early 80's - that sounds like the whalin' of Mexican romance songs; they listen to stuff like Sinatra.

I was going out with a Russian girl last year who was only 26. She listens to
Sinatra!

She wouldn't even give my taste in alternative rock a chance.

A little creepy.

[Hathor]

I don't even want to EXPLORE my musical references with anyone under 30 anymore. It's too depressing for me. My most recent brush with ancient-ness was the current U2 Greatest Hits CD where they had the picture of the band on the cover circa 1985, and a teen-ager next to me wondered who the good-looking guy in the center was. I said that was Bono, (EMPHASIZING **WAS**)and she looked at me like I was pulling her leg.

Lp's may be gone, but the Law of Murphy still applies to library CD's:

"The song you want to hear the most willl have a huge skip in it..."

[Ezra Lb.]

Getting back to Paul's original post, it seems to me you must distinguish between cultural references and out and out stinky old cliches. "Broken record" is surely one of the latter. And since the War against the Cliche must be fought ceaslessly, ask yourself what you are trying to express and then come up with a new simile that might ring down the ages until somebody else comes along and sweeps it away. (Mixing metaphors is fun too.)

Hey robochrist, the Rooskis listening to Sinatra isn't so bad, hell they could be listening to U2.

BWAHAHAHA...

[robochrist]

If the Russians started listening to U2 I'd actually finally be capable of calling them a "culture"!

[breakpoint]

They listened to U2... and A-12, and SR-71...

[Gwyneth M905]

Concur with Ezra that cliches are to be excised. Perhaps "popped like a poorly pirated mpeg"?