“I mentioned that I would listen to a certain actor reading the phone book. Who uses a phone book these days?”
Yes, I know what you mean.
And how about saying someone sounds “like a broken record”? Nobody younger that, what 40? would know what that meant.
And talk radio pioneer Bob Grant always says, when someone caves in to pressure, “he folded like a cheap camera”. I’m just old enough to know what that means, but too young to ever had had one of those cheap cameras.
“Drop a dime” (meaning to rat out to the authorities via an anonymous phone call) was dead once calls went to a quarter. I seem to remember the loss of the meaning of this expression was the major complaint about the cost increase. But now it makes no sense at all. Oh well, it’s so cool & alliterative maybe it will survive, people will just have to google its origns.
Like the phrase “lock, stock & barrel”. I always realized it meant “everthing included” but I always thought it referred to a store, which included the lock on the door, the stock on the shelves and even the pickle barrel. I still think of it that way, although I’ve since learned it refers to the parts of a rifle.
You can tell I grew up in NYC.
Shoot, it’s your nickle.
He was three sheets in the wind.
My eyes were bigger’n my stomach
She can talk the feathers off a blue jay
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
Or what my great grand-daddy used to say “Bring me the liminint lizzie, my rutamizens actin up.
My Speed Graphic (read: stereotypical classic newspaperman’s camera) would be insulted by that comparison....
Travis Tritt had a hit song with “Here’s a Quarter, Call Someone Who Cares,” but even that is meaningless to those who grew up with universal cell-phone ownership.