Terms Which Have Disappeared

[2jakes]

The word SAY "SAY" , "You fellas want to get a beer" "Say" "You girls look great" "Say" You kids stay out of trouble

"John"

I know exactly what you mean !

I mostly hear this in old ' 30s films.

I have a hat like above & whenever I wear it my wife will tell me,

" say...I luv your stetson "....in mock approval !

*****

Other terms that have not disappeared but yet have different meaning today.

For example:
My wife's grandmother from Britain when she noticed something peculiar or odd
she would use the word queer.
On happy occasions , it was gay times.
She never said this in a negative tone...it was the way the language was spoken
back then for her . I miss her so much !

 

[tonyb]

My grandmother used to use the phrase "boarding house reach" as well. She also used to say "apartment house", but then again we also had family who lived in a "trailer house" ...

"Trailer house" was in common usage in my early years in the Upper Midwest, as was "house trailer," to distinguish what we now would call a single-wide mobile home from a travel trailer.

 

[LizzieMaine]

In any boardinghouse you'd find the Hall Room Boys -- young, single men with little visible means of support who were always ducking the landlady when the rent came around, and wore loud sport coats and two-toned shoes and porkpie hats with the brim turned up in front. If you were a parent, you did not want your daughters associating in any way with Hall Room Boys.

 

[Talbot]

Other terms that have not disappeared but yet have different meaning today.

For example:
My wife's grandmother from Britain when she noticed something peculiar or odd
she would use the word queer.
On happy occasions , it was gay times.
She never said this in a negative tone...it was the way the language was spoken
back then for her . I miss her so much !

A decade or so back, cigarettes were still referred to by many as 'fags'.

Where I was working back in the 80's, an older manager asked a visiting American if he'd like a fag.

Awkward.

 

[EliasRDA]

When I was stationed in Germany back in the early 90's, I'd still hear the cigs called faggots or fags, there was no disrepect meant by it as it started as a english word that meant a bundle of sticks, well a rough meaning as I dont have the dictionary meaning handy. And I live in an area that is full of out loud and proud homosexuals of both genders plus gender benders and others. I used to hang with a lot of NYC homosexuals of both genders & they didnt take offense to the word being used as it was orignially intended, cigs matches etc. They took offense if it was used in a demeaning way, I do to the words of cracker, redneck, among others I wont mention.

As to "boarding house reach" I do use it & I'm only in my late 40's. I learned it for family style dining when I was a kid & working in northern restraunts. For reaching accross others to grab a plate that is meant to serve many, you serve yourself from the large plates & pass it on. I usually use it if I have to reach for the pepper. [huh]

 

[tonyb]

A decade or so back, cigarettes were still referred to by many as 'fags'.

Where I was working back in the 80's, an older manager asked a visiting American if he'd like a fag.

Awkward.

Awkward, indeed.

I assume that most of us here don't have to be told that "fag" is an abbreviated "faggot," which, besides its pejorative usage, is a stick or twig or bundle thereof, generally for use as kindling. So it doesn't take a helluva lot of imagination to suppose that "fag" for cigarette is an allusion to a burning stick.

There are other meanings, which a quick visit to most dictionaries would reveal.

 

[tonyb]

As to other slang terms for cigarettes ...

Like many fools of my generation, I took up the nasty cigarette habit in my early teens (and maintained the deadly addiction for nearly another 40 years). Throughout my teens and 20s and even into my 30s it was common among the people I knew to refer to cigarettes as "squares." "Gimme a square" was commonly heard when a friend busted out a fresh pack of smokes.

I was so in the habit of calling them that that it hadn't occurred to me for quite some time that it was meant to distinguish tobacco cigs from those containing that popular illicit substance. You know, "squares" smoked tobacco exclusively.

 

[dh66]

We called them squares when I was a younger man too. I quit them when a pack of camels in the vending machine jumped from 75¢ to $1.10 over a weekend.

Sent from my SGH-T959V using Tapatalk 2

 

[tonyb]

We called them squares when I was a younger man too. I quit them in college, partly because a pack of camels in the vending machine jumped from 75¢ to $1.10 over a weekend. ...

Thank God for that price jump, eh?

When I tell today's youngsters that in my early college days (I returned to haunt those halls many years later) smoking was permitted in some classrooms, they look at me as though I must be lying.

Public attitudes toward smoking have changed dramatically since then, for sure. The scales really got tipping about 20 years ago, and in the past few years it has gotten so that smoking, especially in public, and even out of doors, is generally regarded as inconsiderate and a sign of personal weakness.

If cigarettes weren't so bad for a person, I'd gladly be smoking still, even at today's prices (people are paying upwards of eight bucks a pack out here now). Truth is, I really enjoyed smoking. The drug effect, that kick in the nerves, appealed strongly to me. If I were still a smoker, I'd be on those e-cigs like white on rice.

 

[Tomasso]

When I tell today's youngsters that in my early college days.......smoking was permitted in some classrooms, they look at me as though I must be lying.
.

You could smoke in hospital rooms (unless oxygen was being administered) up until the 70s. My family doctor would smoke while seeing patients at his office and while making rounds at the hospital.

 

[Zombie_61]

As to other slang terms for cigarettes ...

Like many fools of my generation, I took up the nasty cigarette habit in my early teens (and maintained the deadly addiction for nearly another 40 years). Throughout my teens and 20s and even into my 30s it was common among the people I knew to refer to cigarettes as "squares." "Gimme a square" was commonly heard when a friend busted out a fresh pack of smokes.

I was so in the habit of calling them that that it hadn't occurred to me for quite some time that it was meant to distinguish tobacco cigs from those containing that popular illicit substance. You know, "squares" smoked tobacco exclusively.

I think this might be one of those "regional" terms. I've lived in southern California my entire life (so far, anyway) and have only heard that term used once in the late 70s by a former co-worker who had moved here from the east coast.

 

[jamespowers]

I think this might be one of those "regional" terms. I've lived in southern California my entire life (so far, anyway) and have only heard that term used once in the late 70s by a former co-worker who had moved here from the east coast.

You definitely grew up in the southern part of the state. lol lol

 

[HudsonHawk]

"Trailer house" was in common usage in my early years in the Upper Midwest, as was "house trailer," to distinguish what we now would call a single-wide mobile home from a travel trailer.

"Trailer House" is still the most common term in my neck of the woods.

 

[tonyb]

"Trailer House" is still the most common term in my neck of the woods.

Innerestin', that. Where, in general, is your neck of the woods?

Out here, on the sodden shores of Puget Sound, they're most commonly called "mobile homes," or "single wides" or "double wides" or now "manufactured homes."

Even the single wides don't so much resemble trailers anymore, leastwise not the ones of more recent manufacture. Most have "real" siding and vaulted ceilings and lots of other stuff to make them much less trailer-like than they were back when we were kids.

If a person wished, he could find an old trailer house free out here (they come up all the time on Craigslist), if he were willing to move the thing. In this climate, any structure that goes unoccupied (and unheated) for a year or more would be host to a healthy crop of lichens and molds. Those free trailers are generally all but rotted away. It's a pity, too, because some of them had interior walls finished in nice wood veneers and such.

I'm acquainted with people who lived in an old house trailer (or trailer house, depending on one's preference) while building a new structure on their property, and then couldn't even give the trailer away. And that one wasn't in such bad shape, either. I suspect that finding a mobile home park that would have an old trailer like that might prove difficult these days.

 

[Stanley Doble]

There is a movie, "Battle Ground", which depicts a company of GIs trapped in Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge. This was made in 1949, just a few years after the events portrayed, so the popular culture of the period was still current.

So, Van Johnson plays a guy who is consumed by the thought of food. At several points in the film, he sings part of a song that goes:
"There is a boarding house, far, far away
Where they serve ham and eggs three times a day.

Oh! how those boarders yell when they hear that dinner bell ..."

I don't think he ever gets any farther than that.

Boy that one goes back a long ways. Earliest mention I have seen, was in The Gilded Age by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner published in 1873.

It relates to a comic song, possibly a minstrel show or vaudeville tune. A parody of the hymn There Is A Happy Land Far Away.

It went something like this:

There is a boarding house far far away

Where they serve ham and eggs three times a day

You should hear the boarders yell when they hear the dinner bell

They give the landlord Hell

Three times a day.

Later..............................

A quick web search turned up Mark Twains copy of The Old Time Song Book with the following notation, in his own hand on the cover

Two Hundred Old-Time Songs
[Mark Twain's annotated songbook (New York: J. S. Ogilvie, 1896)]

On the cover Clemens copied one of his favorite comic verses, written by Billy Rice and sung to the tune of the hymn "There is a happy land":

There is a boarding house, far, far away,
Where they give ham & eggs 3 times a day
O how them boarders yell
When they hear the dinner bell,
They give the landlord (!)
3 times a day.

The missing word "(!)" was of course "hell." The children "admired it to the limit," and made him "sing it with burdensome frequency."
......................................................................

To get the full import of this you would need to know that ham and eggs was a dish popular in cheap diners and boarding houses. It was not associated with breakfast, it could be served any time. But was not considered very classy.

A fondness for ham and eggs stamped one as common.

There was an English version of the song which substituted fish and chips for ham and eggs, as in

There is a boarding house far away,

Where they serve fish and chips three times a day

Etc.

 

[Stanley Doble]

How about "Say, listen". If you think about it, it doesn't even make sense. Do they want you to say or listen?

From a story by Joe Mitchell in New York about 1934

Woman at beefsteak party: " Say, listen. There's no ketchup on our table. Where's the ketchup?"

Waiter: I'll bring you some.

(to another waiter) Ketchup at a beefsteak! I bet she'd put ketchup on a chocolate cake.

 

[EliasRDA]

Innerestin', that. Where, in general, is your neck of the woods?

Out here, on the sodden shores of Puget Sound, they're most commonly called "mobile homes," or "single wides" or "double wides" or now "manufactured homes."

Tony,
Here in DE they are Mobile homes to most of the old timer agents, although our assoc is trying to get us to not refer to them as such but as Manufactured homes. But the funny part is they have a car title, not a land deed because many of the mobiles sit on leased land (mobile home parks). Now understand one thing about southern delaware aka Sussex County.. you cant put a mobile home on 95% of the owned land due to our land usage plans. You can put a mobile there only if you are going to convert it to a "Class C" home, which is what you described as the homes with the siding & such.
To be a Class C here it must go on a permanent foundation such as block, or pad, have the wheel supports removed, permanent siding added, etc. IOW look like a small ranch styled home. If they are inspected & approved to be a Class C then the title is turned into the DMV who gives you the paperwork for the county offices who turn it into a deed just like any other homes.

As an agent I've seen some really great mobiles & some really bad class c's, same as houses. I still maintain it comes down to the owners, if you have pride in your home even if its a cardboard box then it will show. When I was in the army I took pride in my space, didnt matter if it was in a tent with others or my barracks room, it was mine.

 

[HudsonHawk]

Innerestin', that. Where, in general, is your neck of the woods?

Out here, on the sodden shores of Puget Sound, they're most commonly called "mobile homes," or "single wides" or "double wides" or now "manufactured homes."

That would be Texas. My "ranch" (I like saying that, though it's not really a ranch per se, as I have no livestock, just a tractor) is east-central Texas, where the "trailer houses" are common. The term is also pretty common in West Texas. You'll also sometimes hear them referred to as "twister magnets".

A "manufactured home" means something else here. They're pre-fab homes that are built modularly, and you can take them apart, but you can't simply hook them up to your trailer hitch and haul 'em off.

And don't get me started on "barndominiums".

 

[tonyb]

Yeah, HH, these modern modular houses are really nothing at all like the trailer houses of yore.

Indeed, I don't know of anyone still manufacturing anything akin to the house trailers of a half century and more ago.

I'm now wondering if the remaining old house trailers that survive in decent condition will escalate in value, much as old travel trailers have in recent years. Call it the "nostalgia factor," or something. Maybe not, though. A travel trailer can be hooked up to a pickup truck and hauled away, and they aren't so big that they can't comfortably be accommodated in the average suburban residential driveway. Can't say anything of the sort for those big ol' house trailers. Codes prohibit them in most residential districts, so putting one on one's property probably wouldn't be legal, even if one had the room for it. And I'd think that living in one, in a trailer park or elsewhere, might lose its charm in fairly short order.

 

[Stearmen]

Innerestin', that. Where, in general, is your neck of the woods?

Out here, on the sodden shores of Puget Sound, they're most commonly called "mobile homes," or "single wides" or "double wides" or now "manufactured homes."

.

When ever I see a mobile home park, I always think of the sean in the movie The Last Starfighter, where the earth kid tries to explain to the alien, what a mobile home is. 1
01:10:18 Uh, we live in a mobile home.


01:10:22 That´s a cave that... that goes places.


01:10:25 Only we never went anyplace.


01:10:29 A mobile cave that never went anywhere. Fascinating.