There was a time when a browser was someone looking around a store, when a server was someone taking your order, and when Spam was a food you didn’t request. Nowadays, however, those words are more likely to refer to the Internet.
There was even a time when the word “Internet” was new. So was email, blog, broadband, download, hashtag. And while I welcome these new words—and the technologies they describe—it makes me yearn for some of the old words I don’t hear anymore. Words my grandparents used.
When my grandmother was feeling out-of-sorts, she said she was disgruntled. It was a delicious word that sounded like what it meant. She might have added that she was feeling punk—long before it was rock music.
A remedy for being disgruntled, my grandfather insisted, was gumption. Get out of your chair and do something! Cultivate a little spunk! And whenever I got all dressed up, he would declare that I looked snazzy.
Nobody tells me I look snazzy anymore. Or calls me Skeezix—the name of a comic strip character. Grandpa also called me Scout as if I could really be his trusted guide.
I miss those old words and the people who used them.