Obsolete Technology

[naomikritzer]

On my message board, someone posed the question of whether people's kids would recognize an ashtray.

I thought this over. Ed and I do not smoke. Ed's mother smoked, but not around the girls, and she died in 2005. Minnesota doesn't allow smoking in restaurants and bars. Molly and Kiera do have one friend whose father smokes (the little girl down the block) but he may not smoke around his kid, or in the house.

So I pulled up this image and called Molly in to look. "Do you know what that is?" I asked.

(Ed glanced over at my screen and started laughing.)

Molly squinted at it. "Uhhhh," she said, and glanced at me for clues. "It's a....dish?"

"Do you know what it's used for?"

"...water?"

"It's an ashtray," I said.

"That's what an ashtray looks like?" Molly said, incredulous. "I had pictured them as looking like a cookie tray. I mean a cookie sheet. Only smaller."

I pulled up another picture, this one with a cigarette in it, so she could see how people would prop their cigarette in the notch. And then she saw the Google image search results for "ashtray" and was briefly fascinated by the robot gorilla ashtray and the pirate ashtrays, before being sent off to brush her teeth.

It's weird how much has changed in a generation. (My parents never smoked, but I had enough friends with smoker parents that I'd seen plenty of ashtrays by the time I was nine.)

Comments

[gelsey.livejournal.com]

...

Wow. There are people now who don't know what an ashtray looks like. That's a great thing, I think, but... wow.

I can't remember ever not knowing what one looked like. But then, my Dad was a chain smoker...

[chrysoula.livejournal.com]

Kevin (my husband) smokes, but only outdoors and he puts his butts in an old chamber pot. So I have no idea if Robin will know what one is, either. The very act of smoking has become a lot more transitory for many smokers.

[maevele.livejournal.com]

and when I was about molly's age, we were still making cla ashtrays in art class for our parents.

[naomikritzer]

Well, when I was 16 and took pottery at West, and did wheel pottery, the very first thing we learned to make was called a "dog dish." It was a little dish with short, inward-slanting sides, and I would bet cash the pottery teacher had once called it an "ashtray" but by 1989 had decided having kids making "ashtrays" sent the wrong message.

I can see the shifts that happened even during my own childhood. (Mr. Sederquist's Iron Lung also arrived during my high school years, when they closed the teacher's smoking lounge. The concept of teachers having a room inside the school where they could go smoke cigarettes is utterly bizarre to me now.)

[parasitegirl.livejournal.com]

My mom has a story about picking me up one day from the Red Caboose. She and other adults came to find a group of us in a circle in the sandbox. Some one (not a parent) must have tossed a cigarette butt away in the sandbox, because there we were...sitting cross legged...pinching the butt like a joint and miming a drag, holding it it, and passing it to the person next to us.

None of the parents looked like they couldn't understand where we'd picked up the mime, but all looked very sheepish.

[naomikritzer]

OH GOD.

That's hilarious.

[naomikritzer]

I feel compelled to note that my parents didn't smoke pot, either.

Except there was this one time that a group of Wingra parents got together to plan a skit they were going to perform for students at an event, and one of the parents brought along a joint to pass to "stimulate creativity." My mother had never smoked pot during the 1960s and 1970s, not because she objected to the idea, but because she was always with my father at those sorts of parties and he was never smoking pot. (Meanwhile, he wasn't smoking pot because he was grossed out by smoking. If there'd ever been hash brownies on offer he said he'd have tried one.)

Anyway, put on the spot like this, my mother did the Bill Clinton thing; she didn't want to be the odd one out, but she didn't really want to smoke the joint, so she faked it and didn't inhale.

[davidlevine]

This is a question for kids older than Molly, but I wonder how many people under, say, twenty know why TV screens are measured diagonally...

[cnoocy]

I don't even know that, and I'm 36.

[jimlawrence.livejournal.com]

I'm thirty years past thirty-six and I don't know the answer.

My guess would be something like because the diagonal measurement made the picture size sound bigger than using the width (good old Pythagoras had a theorem about that). Somebody told me that it was because TV screens were originally round and were measured in diameter but if so, that really goes back before my time. We got our first TV in the fall of 1952, when I was 9 and entering 3rd grade, and it did not have round screen. I also got to watch television in the homes that had been the first in the neighborhood to have a TV and those weren't round either... very small screens in big cabinets, but the screens were not round.

[davidlevine]

Indeed, it was because the tube was originally round and advertised by diameter (diagonal = width).

The TV picture was always rectangular, and the tube was usually fitted into the cabinet with flat sides top and bottom, like this: (_) .

[jimlawrence.livejournal.com]

Learn something new everyday. (Or, in this case, learn something old?) Thanks.