Recently, I came with my son to visit my grandmother. When we sat down to drink tea, she took out a cake and said: “The other day they threw it on our counters. It's very tasty! I even took two.” My son, with a serious expression on his face, pushed his plate away and said: “I won't eat what was thrown away.” My grandmother and I laughed, explained to him what this phrase meant, and I remembered other expressions that were once familiar to everyone, but have now been forgotten. And so this little article appeared.
“They threw it out in stores! Buy it!”
This is what they said when a new product appeared in stores. This expression was common during the post-Soviet period of shortages. “Thrown out” meant that a product that was in short supply or completely unavailable suddenly appeared on sale, often in limited quantities. Now this expression is almost never used.
They “threw” (i.e. brought) fruit to the store.
“Hello! I'm calling from a machine”
My childhood was in the 90s. And, probably, the songs that mentioned “machine guns” – “A Girl in a Machine Gun Is Crying” – caused the greatest dissonance in me.
In my imagination, Thumbelina was hiding in the barrel of a machine gun and crying, while some man held the machine gun to his ear like a mobile phone. My mother interrupted my flight of imagination when she explained that a “machine gun” was just a street phone. I think this caused irreparable damage to my creative abilities)
“Automata” was the name given to street phones in the early 2000s.
“Rewind the tape or you'll be fined”
In the mid-90s, our family got a VCR. And with it, a video rental store came into existence, which my dad and I regularly visited. There, you could rent a cassette with a movie, leaving your passport as collateral (people were fearless back then) or a certain amount of cash (there were no bank cards back then). Before returning the movie, my dad always checked whether he had rewound the tape to the beginning – if it wasn't rewound, the rental store would fine you. We also got fined a few times – then I was left without the ice cream that my dad usually bought me when we went to take out or return a movie.
If you returned a videotape to a video rental store without rewinding it to the beginning, you could be fined.
“Enough playing – you'll get a kinescope!”
In elementary school (it was the end of the 90s), my parents bought me a “Dandy” and made me the happiest child (at least within the confines of our apartment). I would play it for hours: “Mario”, “Castelvania” and other hits that were sold at local markets completely captivated me. However, my parents wouldn't let me play for more than an hour, arguing that “the TV would be ruined by a kinescope.”
The term kinescope is unfamiliar to teenagers, as modern TVs are flat and operate on completely different technologies.
In the 1990s, many parents told their children that game consoles “ruined the picture tube,” “destroyed the TV tube,” and so on.
“Reset via IR”
It was already the mid-2000s. The wealthiest classmates started to have mobile phones. First of all, the Siemens C65, which had an infrared (aka IR) port through which you could transfer files – music, pictures. I remember how during breaks, schoolchildren would crowd around the windowsills, on which, leaning against each other, lay two phones – you could only transfer files from close range. And God forbid someone would move one of the mobile phones… Then you would have to start all over again, and the careless friend would definitely learn a lot about himself.
It was possible to transfer files from one phone to another via the infrared port. But for this to work, the devices had to be very close to each other.
