A few years ago, I started a sentence in my class with "When I was born". A student instantly chimed in and said "What in the 19's?" And I thought in my head, of course you idiot, everybody is born in the 19's. It still haunts me.
The scary part is that this comic is 15 years old.
Updated hover text: "I'm teaching every 22-year-old relative to say this, and every 28-year-old to do the same thing with Toy Story. Also, Pokemon hit the US two and a half decades ago and kids born after Aladdin came out will turn 32 next year."
I mean, tbf that was admittedly last millennium.
Over a quarter century ago!
God I feel old.
TBF, the veracity of the information is relatively field dependent. Structural engineering? Yeah, probably still as relevant as the day it was published... Quantum computing or astrobiology theory? Far more likely to be superseded or debunked.
My dad told me recently, when he started practicing medicine the old people with heart failures he was treating were often born in the late 1800s, but now those are all dead, and the people he's treating are more likely to have a birth years that are around 1940-1950. Which is also starting to become uncomfortably close to his own, 1960.
Pro Tip for GenXer's: There is a point in life when you need to pick a Doctor that you like enough to die on. That will be the doctor that will take you through the last years of your life. And treat all those little miserable ailments like high blood pressure or urinary issues. Long term medical care, while it's often something that might not kill you outright, It will demand a lot of monitoring and medication to treat.
A given person's definition of "old" is usually about 15 years older than they are. My boss is 65 and calls 70 year olds "young".
When I started using dating apps I found 24 year olds too old. I still have that impression memorized but it's wild.
I'm Gen-X, 51, and this doesn't sting too much...so like whatever. I do feel for Millenials and the elder Gen-Z though.
Imagine being Gen-Z out to buy some beer, you pull out your ID, the cashier barely glances at it and runs your credit card. You smugly say, "I guess you don't really check ID since you didn't really look at the date." The cashier responds, "I did. I saw the nineteen." Ooooff.
it's an odd feeling to be gatekept from beer by someone who's younger than the stretch marks & grey hairs on my body and; yet; it makes me feel good to be carded nonetheless somehow.
One day, there will only be a handful of people from the 19 hundreds left
The oldest person who ever lived so far made it to 122, so by 2123 they'll almost certainly all be gone.
I’m going to start saying that when asked about my birth year. “The late 1900s”
Mid 80s for me, fuck, im old
Better than the mid 1900's.
I come from a time when our telephones were teathered to the wall and had no screens or apps at all. Later on, there were machines that would answer the phone and let someone record a message if no one was home.
If you wanted to watch something that wasn't a movie or recording, you had to pick one of the options someone else had picked, and if you missed the time, you just missed it until someone decided it was time to play it again (at a different specific time you could miss).
And if you did record something, you'd have to seek through the recording to find the start of it.
Movie rentals involved going to a physical store and grabbing physical media with the content on it. If too many people wanted to rent it at a time, there just wouldn't be enough and the later ones would have to pick something else to watch. Just going to one of these rental places was a borderline magical experience full of wonder and possibility. Oh and it was considered very rude if you rented a movie but didn't seek it back to the beginning for the next person (which you'd have to physically return to the place with the physical media or you'd get charged late fees).
And even though everyone's name, address, and phone number were published in regional "phone books", the closest thing to phone scams you'd (normally) see were prank phone calls, which were done for laughs rather than profit (albeit sometimes maliciously).
Christians actually cared about being good people rather than thinking they can somehow be victims of an apocalypse they are trying to make happen and teleport to heaven because they've said the required amount of hail Marys and took advantage of the "just confess the horrible shit before it die and you're forgiven" loophole (and probably not thinking about what happens if the rapture ends up happening too quickly for them to confess their latest batch of sins). Actually, the crazy ones might have been around then, too, they just weren't so fucking loud back then.
That second millennium was something else, I tell you what. You third millennium kids won't ever understand.
This is just intentionally phrased poorly to create a rise out of people. It's like referring to water as "dihydrogen monoxide".
I put this on an unlabeled squirt bottle once at work. It was wrong to do because technically it's an OSHA violation for being improperly labeled because it was just in sharpie and not a standard label. But it was night shift I was bored and the bottle was already unlabeled so it was already out of compliance. Why not write on it?
A week or so later I heard people talking about this squirt bottle that said dihydrogen monoxide. Two safety guys were there so I didn't take credit for my shenanigans based on the reception not being great.
I said I think it's just water, but the chemical name. Ya know? Nope, they didn't get it. The kind of doubled down and started talking about things in that link because they "researched the name" and it was actually harmful.
It was a strange experience.
To use a quote from the later part of the 1900s:
Time keeps on slippin' into the future.
To use another from the very late 1900s
The years start comin' and they don't stop comin'
Reading that just broke my hip.
It seems awkward to me to refer to the previous century that way until you're at least halfway through the next century. Even then, that's pushing it. Basically I think that way of referring to an era implies you're over, or at least fairly close to, 100 years away from it.
I regularly say "from the 20th century" when I want to emphasize the age, the irrelevance, of my lack of knowledge of something.
I don't know crap about cars, so sometimes, someone would ask me about an old one or something and I'd say "not sure, mid-20th century I think".
It's a funny way to talk about it and it almost masks the fact I just tried to get away with a 25-year window.
Although in a more rude manner I'll also say I don't care about some 20th century movie or something.
From the last millennium
It does depend what we're talking about. The geology of Himalaya or computer technology? One of these things didn't change much in the last forty years.
I suddenly feel like the crypt keeper
We can't possibly be that old! I feel you've made a grave mistake
Isn't this an actual thing? Pretty sure I was told by some instructor not to use references older than a decade or two. Unless the subject is very elementary older sources are more likely to be obsolete
Depends on the subject. Historians use a lot older materials more regularly for obvious reasons.
TTT... no matter how much we don't like to admit it.
Someone left me a reply just yesterday with that date format. At first I was going to reply back that they must have made a typo, but then realized they weren't wrong. Ouch.
I just pulled my back and broke my hips reading this, it made me feel so old 👴🏻
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