What words have disappeared from our vocabulary? My 89 year old aunt calls a garbage can.. an ashcan.?

Question

She buys cornplasters for her bunions. She plays a victrola in her parlor. What other words have disappeared from our everyday vocabulary?

Answer 1

Your aunt might have graduated from a Victrola to a Hi-Fi at some point, when that meant a combined entertainment unit containing a radio and phonograph.

It's also possible that her Doctor would have told her to stop using butter and switch to Oleo, which is what my grandmother called the margarine in her Frigidaire (even though it was a GE-brand refrigerator). Oleo comes from Oleomargarine. Neither half sounds very tasty to me. "Frigidaire," although not extinct, represents a whole other genre of brands replacing a less poetic technical name for a product, as "Kleenex" replaced facial tissue, except, I am sure, for your dear Aunt, who uses a hanky.

Answer 2

My grandmother referred to a dish towel as a tea towel (it may have been tee towel). A shallow ditch was never just a ditch, it was a bar ditch. The refrigerator was an ice box, left over from the days when people kept things cool in a cabinet like thing that held a block of ice in the top. Couples didn't date, the boy courted the girl. The kitchen range was a cook stove. A wench or pulley system was a come-a-long. A bucket was a pale, except for the one for the well. A lever on a farm implement was, for some reason nobody could ever explain, called a Johnson bar. Grandmother treated colds and congestion with what she called an assafitity bag, a little pouch she stuffed with God knows what that stunk something awful. A potato was a spud.

Answer 3

Your grandmother is refering to the time when coal furnaces were quite popular and you had to take the clinkers out of the firebox and put them in the ash can. She is very lucky to have a working victrola. Not many of them around anymore. Those things for the corns were complasts. When we were very sick mon used to put a mustard plaster on our chest. There was the mangler or iron right iron with a roller and the clothes were run thru by operating it with knee pedals. There are tons more, but I am drawing a blank right now.

Answer 4

I'm sure your aunt is slaughtering the word "trashcan" by leaving off the "tr"

However I no longer hear the word Nifty very often.

Answer 5

Well, for one - I've heard about going to hell in a handbasket but never knew what the hell a handbasket was do you?

Have you heard much about a 'rumble seat' lately?

Elementary schools used to be called Grammar Schools.

Answer 6

I love old words! My grandma also had a davenport. She used cosmetics instead of makeup.

Answer 7

My grandmother reffered to the sofa/couch as the davenport.

Answer 8

strumpet . . . I sure wish that word would make a comeback. It's so much more fun than simply calling someone a "ho"

Answer 9

"Sparking". In the early twenties men did not go out on a date so to speak..They went "sparking".

Answer 10

Gay - it was HAPPY.
Alot of other words that have "disappeared" are also cases of changed meanings.