Lost Words: Remember When We Used Fax Machines?
Have you ever tried explaining a fax machine to a teenager? (I did yesterday!) It’s like describing a world without smartphones: ‘We used to scan documents and send them through phone lines. No, not as an email attachment…‘
Once upon a time, we used telephone books to find numbers, watched films on video cassette recorders (VCRs) and recorded messages on answering machines (because voicemail wasn’t a thing).
Families proudly displayed their encyclopaedias on their shelves—giant books that Google replaced overnight. We typed on clunky typewriters, rewound cassette tapes with pencils and walked around with a Walkman (a prehistoric version of Spotify, but chunkier) clipped to our jeans, feeling invincible.
Now? These words are disappearing faster than the last bag of popcorn at a Friday night film marathon.
As technology sprints ahead, our vocabulary shifts too.
What’s next? Will “email” sound ancient in 20 years?
Let’s take a moment to appreciate these forgotten gems. Tell me about your favourite “extinct” word—bonus points if you memorised phone numbers before mobile phones saved them.
Dear Christine,
Gabi always laughs at me when I speak about „Eisenbahn“ or „Eisschrank“. In former times texts were created for people – they knew what words stand for.
Nowadays texts tend to be created to be understood by KI and large language models. Maybe there will be a time when we use „new“ words just to communicate with other persons and not to be understood by machines or KI.
Yours. Ulli
Dear Ulli,
Oh, the good old days when ‘Eisenbahn’ and ‘Eisschrank’ were just normal words. Maybe one day, we’ll invent a secret human language that AI can’t understand—until it learns that, too.
We’re living in crazy times, aren’t we?
Christine