Turn of a phrase means trouble
My 20th high school class reunion didn't make me feel old.
My 40th birthday didn't make me feel old.
The fact that my daughter is now 16 hasn't made me feel old - yet. She doesn't get her driver's license until November. Ask me then.
But today, I felt old.
Oh, it wasn't the commercial I saw for the 25th anniversary DVD of "The Blues Brothers," either, although that came close - I'd seen it in the theater.
It wasn't even the box my wife bought so I'd remember to take my pills every morning.
What made me feel old was something relatively mindless. Something I'd never thought of before.
I was speaking with a few early 20-somethings when I started to stress a point I'd already made. The words I was going to say bounced around my head, danced up and down my synapses and threw so many red flags around the inside of my skull it looked like I was marking buried power cables.
I almost, but didn't, say the following words: "I don't mean to sound like a broken record."
I'm glad I stopped.
These people were in their early 20s. The compact disc is in its early 20s. Had they even seen a record player apart from something a DJ scratched on a VH1 retro rap video? The record was going the way of the 8-track before most of these kids were potty trained.
But it wasn't the fact that an LP was to them what the American League without a designated hitter is to me. I can deal with that. Things change, people are born, I'm old. Big deal.
It was that an accepted cliché of the English language, like "A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush," "I can't trust him as far as I can throw him" and "Beam me up, Scotty" had become obsolete in my lifetime.
Oh, wait. Is "Beam me up, Scotty" obsolete?
No?
Then God bless reruns and geek parents.
But unless these kids grew up with their grandparents, they won't know that a record stylus skips if it hits a scratch, bounces back, and whatever had just played will play again and again and again until somebody lifts the stylus out of the groove.
If they don't know how a broken record behaves, then "sound like a broken record" has been rendered meaningless to all future generations.
That made me think, what other clichés that made sense to me growing up, were now useless?
"The sky's the limit" is a fine candidate.
We go or send things into outer space all the time, so, the sky's not the limit anymore.
Yeah, it's that kind of stuff that makes me feel old.
And I don't think my 25th high school reunion is going to make me feel any better.
