157
What's that dear? My ears aren't what they used to be
(piefed.cdn.blahaj.zone)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 02 Dec 2025
157 points (98.2% liked)
Microblog Memes
9885 readers
416 users here now
A place to share screenshots of Microblog posts, whether from Mastodon, tumblr, ~~Twitter~~ X, KBin, Threads or elsewhere.
Created as an evolution of White People Twitter and other tweet-capture subreddits.
Rules:
- Please put at least one word relevant to the post in the post title.
- Be nice.
- No advertising, brand promotion or guerilla marketing.
- Posters are encouraged to link to the toot or tweet etc in the description of posts.
Related communities:
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
I'd guess they know the word even if they don't think about the etymology. Just like the only phone I ever used with a physical dial belonged to my grandmother but I still knew what dialling a phone was (and didn't make the connection until decades later when I saw it mentioned as a linguistic artifact like I'm doing now.)
Tape and Dial have a similar etymology, but in modern usage tape has fallen out of use in favour of the more generic 'record', while dial is still current.
Dial is used a lot less than it was, admittedly; if you want to make a voice call it's usually from a stored contact or a number on a website so we just 'phone' or 'call' people most of the time.
But the physical act of interacting with a sequence of individal numbers to initiate a call? We don't have a better word for that than 'dial'
Tape though, there's a very real chance that a young person can hear 'tape' and not have the slightest clue what that means.
That's true, 'tape' is certainly more rare than it used to be, I do agree that it's fading but I still think 'the kids' would have likely heard it from a parent (or grandparent at this point) and asked or gotten the jist from context.
There are 7 year olds whose parents never interacted with a VHS player, because the VHS was already dying when they were born.
Turn the lights on
That's a good one, I actually had to look it up because I got stuck at thinking of turning a knob to turn on a radio, but those were after light bulbs.
Gaslights had knobs to control the flow before electricity.