Terms Which Have Disappeared

[rjb1]

We have the same road situation here - an Interstate that cut the minority community in half and caused it to go downhill even faster than it might have otherwise. No one has had the nerve to suggest removing it, which would be almost impossible, but they are finally trying ways to mitigate the problem (several decades too late).
I don't think people were quite hypocritical enough back when it was built to have said it would improve things for the people there, they just didn't care about any problems it would cause, and the people who were about to suffer from it didn't have any means of stopping it.

And speaking of "urban renewal" in the sixties, our local University had the surrounding area declared "blighted" and took the land and about 200 houses from a lot of unfortunate people. In later years I thought that if some third-world dictator had arbitrarily removed a village, driven the people out of their homes, and bombed the houses so he could expand his summer palace, he would be indicted by the UN for crimes against humanity.

 

[3fingers]

Here's one from my father. He would tell us to "Quit playing dog in the manger". I knew what he meant, but the phrase itself never made sense to me. I did not know until I was an adult that it comes from a 15th century fable.

 

[sheeplady]

And speaking of "urban renewal" in the sixties, our local University had the surrounding area declared "blighted" and took the land and about 200 houses from a lot of unfortunate people. In later years I thought that if some third-world dictator had arbitrarily removed a village, driven the people out of their homes, and bombed the houses so he could expand his summer palace, he would be indicted by the UN for crimes against humanity.

The same happened with the university here- they were granted blocks and blocks of houses that had been seized by the government as part of urban renewal. While there were many more blocks that had been seized, the ones east of the university were kept and given to the university for free. The university then sold these to staff and faculty at incredibly cheap prices- almost for free (they said you could pick up a house for a couple of thousand of dollars at a time when real estate was really expensive here). The idea was to promote staff and faculty living close to campus, making it a residential neighborhood. Think "the really nice area near the university where the staff and faculty live" type of thing.

It backfired because the sales/ mortgages failed to enforce that the property had to be the owner's primary residence and an owner could only have one piece of property. They also failed to require that the homes be updated or kept in good condition. I believe that all this could have been done through the mortgages (which where held by the university).

So essentially a small group of staff and faculty became slumlords.

I understand that the houses that were removed were horrible and it made way for tracts of public housing and hospital development. But it certainly was not managed correctly and wasn't the solution to the deep structural problems that had made that area a ghetto to begin with.

 

[Fading Fast]

Urban renewal -- another term which has disappeared -- was sort of like cutting off your foot to cure an ingrown toenail. I think it had more to do with technocrats like Robert Moses, who liked cars and highways and parking lots far more than he liked people, than with actual social reformers.

It's been replaced in the modern mindset by "gentrification," but the results are the same. The people displaced have nowhere to go, and they end up being shoved more and more into society's dark closet.

Robert Moses did an insane amount of damage to NYC - and some of the worst (a highway across lower Manhattan bisecting Greenwich Village) fortunately, never happened - but at the time, most of America had fallen in love with the car and suburbs and didn't wants trains and cities (which is why we have a national highway system but no high speed trains). He was a government tyrant, which is one of the reasons I always worry about power and authority being concentrated in anyone's hand - public or private.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Robert Moses did an insane amount of damage to NYC - and some of the worst (a highway across lower Manhattan bisecting Greenwich Village) fortunately, never happened - but at the time, most of America had fallen in love with the car and suburbs and didn't wants trains and cities (which is why we have a national highway system but no high speed trains). He was a government tyrant, which is one of the reasons I always worry about power and authority being concentrated in anyone's hand - public or private.

Where Moses was wrong was his belief that people should be displaced in the service of technology -- cars and superhighways. Early in his career in New York he did a lot of good creating new park space and recreational facilities. But he took one trip too many thru the Futurama at the World's Fair, and bought one hundred percent of the idea that by 1960 the city would -- and should -- be entirely remade in service of the automobile. It was good for General Motors, but it wasn't any good for the country.

What Moses desperately needed was a strong, powerful mayor who had the guts to keep him in his place. LaGuardia was as close as the city ever came to having such a mayor, but after he died there was no longer any stopper on the giant frothing bottle that was Moses' obsession with the automobile.

 

[Stanley Doble]

The juvenile delinquent was invented in the fifties. Watch Rebel Without A Cause, High School Confidential, and dozens of similar fifties movies. See greasy hoods in leather jackets with a switchblade in one hand and a reefer in the other, careening through a school zone on 2 wheels in their hopped up Mercuries and Ford roadsters, one arm around a blonde in a tight sweater.

Dig this Peter Gunn episode featuring Norm Grabowski's iconic roadster, better known as Kookie's car from 77 Sunset Strip. That is Norm behind the wheel, and later at Rockabilly's road house.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U03RhIRO1eo

 

[skydog757]

A term heard much less frequently these days is "Saved my bacon". As in "I thought I'd never finish that project on time, but Tony pitched in and really saved my bacon."

 

[Stearmen]

Golly Gee Willikers

 

[MissMittens]

A term heard much less frequently these days is "Saved my bacon". As in "I thought I'd never finish that project on time, but Tony pitched in and really saved my bacon."

That's still popular in England IIRC

 

[KILO NOVEMBER]

Here are two terms, now either extinct in everyday use, or at least transformed, which harken back to the first post:

Laundry mark
Laundry list

The former is hardly heard, but I do see them on shirts I wear with my suits which I take to a commercial laundry/dry cleaner because I don't like spending the time ironing them myself. I imagine they were once very common in urban areas before the advent of the Laundromat (which I believe was an early post-WWII innovation) and in-home washing machines. "Laundry mark" frequently turns up in detective stories like Dragnet, which kicked off this thread. I found this article from 1946 on "Modern Methods of Identification by Laundry and Cleaners' Marks" using Google.

All the items likely to have laundry marks would have been recorded on a "laundry list". I heard this term used in a radio news report this morning, and there was nothing about laundry in the story. I imagine that "laundry list" is rarely used to refer to an actual laundry list anymore.

 

[Fading Fast]

Have we brought up "dance card" as in "her dance card is always full," meaning she has many suitors. I believe this comes from a time when women literally listed out who their dance partners would be for each dance of the evening and, obviously, the most popular girls' cards filled up the fastest as all the boys were requesting dances with them. I've seen movies on TCM where women at balls had cards on strings attached to their wrists - these were all turn-of-the-last-century time-period-based movies.

 

[Stanley Doble]

The comedy/murder mystery Shadow Of The Thin Man features a laundry list as an important clue. The laundry list was a list of items sent to the laundry, which was supposed to match the list that came back with the clean clothes.

In this case a gambling ring used a secret code disguised as a laundry list, to communicate betting information from one city to another.

 

[buelligan]

Here's one I heard today that until I heard it I had forgotten all about it "Born again Christian" maybe I just don't hang with the right crowd but I haven't heard that one in years.

 

[Stanley Doble]

Smorgasbord. This Swedish term had a brief vogue in the US in the late fifties.

 

[LizzieMaine]

"Lunchroom," which used to mean a small downtown storefront restaurant with a counter along one wall and a row of small tables or one-arm school chairs along the other, serving simple inexpensive meals to people in a hurry. These were the "fast food joints" of the first half of the twentieth century, and there were big regional chains such as the Waldorf Lunch System in New England, Bickfords in New York, and the Thompson Lunch Rooms in the midwest, along with thousands of mom-and-pop independents.

Lunchrooms were driven to extinction by the suburban hamburger chains on the one side and by the more pretentious "cafe" type restaurants on the other. Diners were an extention of the lunchroom idea, but were self-contained prefabricated buildings. A proper lunchroom was always in a narrow rented storefront, and a diner never was. A "Luncheonette" was even smaller and humbler than a lunchroom -- definitively, it only contained counter seating. The next step down from a "luncheonette" was a "lunch wagon."

 

[dh66]

Don't forget about the "automat".

Sent from my SGH-T959V using Tapatalk 2

 

[Seraph1227]

I find regional terms fascinating. Do you sit on a "sofa" or a "couch"? Put your groceries in a "bag" or a "sack"? Is the sweet the sweet stuff on the top of your cake "frosting" or "icing"? This is probably a whole other topic.

my grandmama referred to it as the Davenport.

 

[Seraph1227]

"Go put your TARGET (22 rifle) in the TURTLE (automobile trunk or boot) and well go hunting later."

i often heard my father refer to the trunk as a " turtleback"

 

[HudsonHawk]

Don't forget about the "automat".

Sent from my SGH-T959V using Tapatalk 2

When I moved to Texas in high school, I heard people talking about the automat. I had no clue what they were talking about for several months, until one day I was *in* the automat and asked what and where it was. "This....you're standing in it". Oh. I later learned that it wasn't even a real automat.

 

[skydog757]

Word useage with different older meanings also seem to fade. As in the word "get"; for example in I's a Wonderful Life when Nick the bartender keeps ringing the cash register and says "Get me! I'm givin' out wings!" This could also be substituted with "get a load of . . ." This was usually used derisivly as in "Get a load of that clown."