What phrases commonly used today are derived from obsolete technologies?

VA Viper ^ | 05/04/2016 | HarpyGoddess

[txnativegop]

professors who teach logic claim that mind your p’s and q’s comes from the their field. lol

[firebrand]

????

[txnativegop]

the professor who taught logic when I was in school swore that the phrase came from the logic problems which always use p and q.

[firebrand]

I’d love to know why.

[txnativegop]

me too, I asked and he gave a plausible answer, since I knew no better, I had no reason to doubt him.

[central_va]

Go get a BT punch.

[amigatec]

Once the belts are linked together in the ammo boxes on the wings, you have 27 feet.

[Fiji Hill]

When something is recorded into either a video or audio file, I often hear it said that it is “on tape.”

[Fiji Hill]

President Obama claimed that the stimulus bill he was pushing would create “shovel-ready” jobs.

[txnativegop]

I did not even think of aircraft, silly me. Thanks.

[gleeaikin]

Sounds like Opium Pipe dream. Just a guess.

[Yardstick]

Yep, just googled it and that’s it.

[zeugma]

Toward the recent end of my career, I worked with a lot of young military types. All of them pretty smart, but not familiar with some things. I had to explain a lot of these terms and origins to them. My favorite one was “rabbit test” for pregnancy. For all of their lives it’s been peeing on a test stick.

I take it the phrase "Can't catch me, 'cause the rabbit done died", would have left them rather clueless.

[Max in Utah]

“Don’t go off half-cocked”

[Lazamataz]

My favorite is “Folding the yargo and spinning polistricallicly.”

It comes from, when you are spinning up your faster-than-light drive and position yourself too close to a graviton wave, and this causes your timespace relational matrix to ‘yargo’, or spin futurewise, and you end up several thousand years in the past due to timespace folding.

Oh wait, this IS the year 3119, right? I’m in the right timeframe to reveal this technology?

[Lazamataz]

I take it the phrase "Can't catch me, 'cause the rabbit done died", would have left them rather clueless.

I actually looked up this Aerosmith lyric, and it turns out it is a mistake. ALL rabbits used to die in the early pregnancy tests. You had to kill them to find out.

So the implication that the rabbit dies only on a positive, is incorrect.

[zeugma]

So the implication that the rabbit dies only on a positive, is incorrect.

Interesting, and makes sense.