Thanksgiving weekend for me, and perhaps for you too, meant several generations at the table for dinner. It was delightful, as it always is, to sit with both a younger generation an older generation and the one in between. For a while I was in the younger generation, I graduated to the middle generation, now I sit among the elders. Sigh.
I love to hear the chatter that flows around the table. I eavesdrop into conversations and enjoy whatever the talk is about. This weekend I heard a good one. A grandmother referred to the pound sign (#) and her granddaughter looked beyond puzzled until the one in the middle generation explained pound means hashtag! That made me laugh out loud. Pound means hashtag! What was so clear and understood by my generation was a puzzle to the one down the line who has lived her life in the metric system and probably has no idea what a pound is let alone the symbol for it! Now # means hashtag and that puts me into a whole dialogue that I don’t understand. Hashtags, first used with Twitter and now common on other social media platforms are something I do not understand. I don’t twitter or tweet!
But the whole conversation exchange has left me thinking about words and phrases that have changed meaning or do not get used at all anymore. We don’t really “dial a number” so we? We key it in. We don’t “roll up the window” in our car or “turn the dial” for a new tv station. We seldom lick an envelop because we don’t often write letter and never lick a stamp anymore they come ready to peel and stick. I don’t remember peeling and sticking things when I was a kid, I always had to lick stuff first with that resultant terrible glue taste in my mouth. Drive-throughs and take-outs were not known by my parents generation, the novelty in my youth was going to the A&W when they would bring the food to your car and hang a tray on the car window – remember that? And yet today, can we imagine a world without the convenience of drive-through and take-out? Remember having two keys for your car – one for the ignition and one for the trunk? Now we use a fob – keyless entries started in the early 80’s and quickly became the way of life.
All this translates into church land too. Inclusive language – a hot button issues for many church leaders in the early 80’s is now expected, well, at least in liberal denominations. Hymns that speak of salvation and use blood imagery are not used anymore and we focus more on the work of the Spirit than the need for redemption. We did not sing the hymn, “We Plow the Fields and Scatter” this year because the imagery seems remote from this suburban congregation I am with right now. Because I tend to use the Common Lectionary with its three year cycle of scripture readings for each Sunday I have always kept files of my services so I can refer back to them. When I look at what I was preaching when I began ministry, and the prayer language I used then, I am often slightly embarrassed and I usually end up putting those pages in the recycle bin.
Sometimes we bemoan change and sometimes we rejoice in it. I miss Sunday afternoons when it felt right to do nothing much other than rest and reflect but I do sometimes appreciate the convenience of stopping in at the grocery store on my way home from church. I miss the feeling of it being special when someone called ‘long distance’ and your conversation was treasured because every minute cost money. But I do like being able to pick up the phone at any time and catch up with someone no matter where they live. Phrases like “Hold your horses” and “Hit the hay” speak to our rural heritage but they still occasionally pepper our language.
Curious – what words and phrases have you heard that make you stop and think or maybe make you wonder what they mean or cast you back to a day of your youth? Let me know – this could be fun!
