NO MORE: Roll up the window. Dial the phone. Hang up the phone. Light the oven.
There are likely all kinds of phrases we use that are no longer relevant to the actions that spurred them.
You won’t find many windows with a handle to use to roll it up or down; most are electric.
Telephones, well, so many things have changed and are still changing with those. We can remember asking people as a joke, “where are you?” when they answered their phone at home. On the wall. In the kitchen. It was funny then, because the caller knew the location of that landline. Now, with cellphones, the sky is the limit on where a person might be.
Ringtones weren’t a thing — no bad country music shrieking in the middle of the grocery store. And now, busy signals aren’t a thing. In our opinion, being unreachable was kind of nice.
At home, we remember an old kitchen stove that was a hand-me-down from a generation or two before. We had to light the oven after turning on the gas. That’s certainly not the case anymore.
A lot of sounds make that list, too. Remember the noises of an old cash register, the “cha-ching” and the sound of the drawer sliding out?
The noise of a computer connecting to dial-up internet? Even further back, remember the noises of a typewriter — one of those huge, heavy monsters with the clacks and dings and the manual return?
A sound of our childhood was what woke us up every morning, the man down the road would sneeze when he went outside to leave for work. It was roughly the volume of a foghorn and would make sure we made it to school on time.
