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Time to turn the channel

Category: Life

Published Date

Written by Paul Roy

While driving behind the dirty windshield today, I started thinking about some expressions you just don’t hear anymore. Most of them are due to technology changing in the past twenty years or so. I thought I would write some of them down and feel free to add your own.

Actually, I just mentioned one, the term write, most people don’t write anymore, they blog, email, post, text or IM. It’s interesting how we still say type a note though and not word process one, I guess technically we are typing on the keyboard. I admit I miss the clickety-clack of an old-fashioned typewriter. There was something reassuring about hearing the ding at the end of the line, you felt like you were actually making progress on that term paper you waited until the last minute to type. Even the word computer isn’t used much anymore, instead we use the term laptop, desktop or notebook.

When was the last time your wife, husband, domestic partner or significant other asked you to “Turn the channel?” For those of you too young to remember, in the old days televisions actually had a dial where you had to physically get out of the chair to turn the dial in order to change the channel. After you turned the channel, often you would also have to either adjust the rabbit ears, or use the antenna rotator to get a better signal. Not that there were a whole lot of options (we had four channels to choose from) but it certainly could be a challenge to channel surf. And we weren’t couch potatoes, from all the getting up to turn the channel we were more like French fries.

How about dialing a phone? When is the last time you had to dial someone up? I wonder if they even manufacture dial phones anymore, I’ll have to go to the phone company and check it out. What’s that you say, the phone company no longer sells phones, you have to go to Wal-mart or the wireless store?

And who out there remembers the sound of real popcorn, the kind you popped in the pan? My father had a special popcorn popping pan and he would pour some oil in it, when it heated up, he would place one kernel in the oil, if it sizzled, he would pour the kernels in and shake that pan, beating the heck out of the bottom as is scraped across the burner. And of course it was topped with real butter.

And then there are Dictionaries. I’m not talking what you find online, I’m talking about those 1,000 page behemoths we all had somewhere in the house, ours was on the bookshelf in the den. When you didn’t know how to spell a word, you would have to haul out the book, when I weighed 50 pounds I am sure it weighed 75, and page through it until you found the word you were looking for, or at least a reasonable facsimile thereof. After all the reason you were using the dictionary in the first place was because you didn’t know how to spell a word. When you found what you thought might be the word, you could read the definition and decide if it was the right word or not. Today, there is spell-check. As you type, at least in my case, the line will be underlined in red and when I look back I know there is an error and I can simply right click on the word and a list of suitable words will appear and you can pick the one which is correct. Of course if you pick the wrong word you will never know it since the word is spelled correctly, it just isn’t the correct word. I used to use the auto correct feature which would automatically replace the word, but when you type like I do, you tend to really mess up words and who knows what the computer will replace it with. I have also found now that when you no longer use a dictionary you no longer learn new words. As an example the other day I needed to use the word hologram. If I had spelled it wrong and I didn’t use the dictionary, I would never have learned the word Holocene.

Now if I could only find some way to check my grammer, I mean grammar.