A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
Rules
I regularly say "from the 20th century" when I want to emphasize the age, the irrelevance, of my lack of knowledge of something.
I don't know crap about cars, so sometimes, someone would ask me about an old one or something and I'd say "not sure, mid-20th century I think".
It's a funny way to talk about it and it almost masks the fact I just tried to get away with a 25-year window.
Although in a more rude manner I'll also say I don't care about some 20th century movie or something.
You should check out which movies came out in 1999.
I mean, sure, fair, it IS late 1900's, but...
I feel old and I wasn't even born on the 1900s
Get off my lawn, young'n.
1800's?
Early 2000s
I fEeL oLd AnD wAs OnLy BoRn In ThE eArLy 2000's
Looks at time. Oh wow, that was only 24 years ago HaHa!
This is just intentionally phrased poorly to create a rise out of people. It's like referring to water as "dihydrogen monoxide".
How so? I would certainly call something from 1894 to be from the "late 1800s' or late 19th century. I mean, we're a quarter of the way through this century, at some point it turns into history.
Because people don't use that terminology when referring to a time period within a majority of living people's lifetime.
This may be a "loanword" from the student's native language. In Swedish, they use "1900-talet" (1900s) instead of "twentieth century"
I put this on an unlabeled squirt bottle once at work. It was wrong to do because technically it's an OSHA violation for being improperly labeled because it was just in sharpie and not a standard label. But it was night shift I was bored and the bottle was already unlabeled so it was already out of compliance. Why not write on it?
A week or so later I heard people talking about this squirt bottle that said dihydrogen monoxide. Two safety guys were there so I didn't take credit for my shenanigans based on the reception not being great.
I said I think it's just water, but the chemical name. Ya know? Nope, they didn't get it. The kind of doubled down and started talking about things in that link because they "researched the name" and it was actually harmful.
It was a strange experience.
i dont take much stock in calendars these days. too painful
My dad told me recently, when he started practicing medicine the old people with heart failures he was treating were often born in the late 1800s, but now those are all dead, and the people he's treating are more likely to have a birth years that are around 1940-1950. Which is also starting to become uncomfortably close to his own, 1960.
A given person's definition of "old" is usually about 15 years older than they are. My boss is 65 and calls 70 year olds "young".
Cause as you get older, you realize that a lot of the hype about people being "old" is manufactured. I'm closing in on 30 and I'm squarely in a zone I thought was "old" when I was 18. But I feel like I still have my whole life ahead of me. And despite a lot of fear mongering, I still feel healthy and ready for anything.
And although I definitely feel like 45 is pretty old, I know that when my parents were that age they were scoffing and telling me "45 is not that old". I'm sure when I'm 60 I'll be looking at retirement and think about how it's actually not too bad to be 60 and it's the 80 year olds that are really old.
Being 30 myself all I can say is: you poor fool
With one parent who turned 80 this year and the second in their late 70s, I’ve realized there’s a difference between “elderly” and “old.” A lot of people equate the two. I think “old” always started in one’s 70s to me, even as a kid. “Elderly,” however, is not based on a number but on a physical state of being.
My dad is elderly. He’s frail and struggling to move around much. It’s hard to watch and it’s been going on and worsening for a few years now. My mom, despite being only 3 years younger, is not at all elderly. She has more energy and vivacity than many people over 20 years her junior (hell I’m in my 30s and she can do loops around me, but I got the chronic illness genes that she didn’t have). Technically, she’s old. But no one who knows her would think of her as “elderly.”
A few years ago, I started a sentence in my class with "When I was born". A student instantly chimed in and said "What in the 19's?" And I thought in my head, of course you idiot, everybody is born in the 19's. It still haunts me.
The scary part is that this comic is 15 years old.
Updated hover text: "I'm teaching every 22-year-old relative to say this, and every 28-year-old to do the same thing with Toy Story. Also, Pokemon hit the US two and a half decades ago and kids born after Aladdin came out will turn 32 next year."
It seems awkward to me to refer to the previous century that way until you're at least halfway through the next century. Even then, that's pushing it. Basically I think that way of referring to an era implies you're over, or at least fairly close to, 100 years away from it.
I mean if your life started in 2005 and you didnt live through any of the 20th century, calling it the late 1900s seems totally reasonablr. You werent there when people were living through the "90s", to you its just another bygone era that people speak about in waya you'll never be able to relate to.
Students are often awkward
Not to mention they could be on the spectrum. I could see a buddy of mine phrasing this question in this exact manner
I'm Gen-X, 51, and this doesn't sting too much...so like whatever. I do feel for Millenials and the elder Gen-Z though.
Imagine being Gen-Z out to buy some beer, you pull out your ID, the cashier barely glances at it and runs your credit card. You smugly say, "I guess you don't really check ID since you didn't really look at the date." The cashier responds, "I did. I saw the nineteen." Ooooff.
Reading that just broke my hip.
One day, there will only be a handful of people from the 19 hundreds left
To use a quote from the later part of the 1900s:
Time keeps on slippin' into the future.
To use another from the very late 1900s
The years start comin' and they don't stop comin'