EnidBuzz asks “What’s a habit that makes people seem old?”
The answerers interpreted it two ways: (1) Physical habits like naps and groaning that are automatic results of aging in any era; (2) Language or cultural habits specific to earlier decades, like writing checks or using landline phones.
One of the latter caught my eye since it relates to a topic I’ve been covering.
Calling the refrigerator an icebox.
This was universal in the ’50s and ’60s when ALL household cooling devices were electrical refrigerators. I think it was aided by plain old phonetics. Refrigerator is a hard word like February or rural. Too many Rs. Icebox is an easy word.
Unlike some technologies**, iceboxes depended entirely on one commercial service. Iceboxes went out of style automatically when the ice houses stopped delivering ice.
BUT: The change of wording didn’t happen quite the way we remember. In the era when iceboxes were nearly universal, they were called refrigerators in print. I noticed this when I was looking up old material in Googlebooks. Searching for icebox gave no results.
Google’s ngram thingie shows the pattern:
In print, ALL cooling devices have ALWAYS been called refrigerators. Icebox has never been common in books and magazines. It peaked briefly around 1940, at the moment when the icehouses were going out of business and the distinction was important. Then it faded down after the word refrigerator had switched its semantic referent. (The second peak of refrigerator in 2012 is puzzling. There wasn’t a technical change in fridges themselves. Aha! Internet Of Things.)
Google doesn’t track speech, but we know that icebox was universal in speech during the era when iceboxes were universal. It didn’t fade until 1970.
You can’t force a change in language. Language always follows its own laws. You can abolish iceboxes or women or men in print, but speech refuses to comply.
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** When music companies stopped making LPs and cassettes, you could keep playing your existing stock of LPs and cassettes. You can’t collect ice.
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