The 1900s

A few years ago, I started a sentence in my class with "When I was born". A student instantly chimed in and said "What in the 19's?" And I thought in my head, of course you idiot, everybody is born in the 19's. It still haunts me.
- The scary part is that this comic is 15 years old.
  
  Updated hover text: "I'm teaching every 22-year-old relative to say this, and every 28-year-old to do the same thing with Toy Story. Also, Pokemon hit the US two and a half decades ago and kids born after Aladdin came out will turn 32 next year."

I mean, tbf that was admittedly last millennium.
- Over a quarter century ago!
  God I feel old.
  
  TBF, the veracity of the information is relatively field dependent. Structural engineering? Yeah, probably still as relevant as the day it was published... Quantum computing or astrobiology theory? Far more likely to be superseded or debunked.
  
  I have a backpack that's over a quarter of a century old. Which I got new, and have been using actively for that time. Great fucking backpack.
  
  Not yet, it won't be over a quarter century ago for 2 more years.

My dad told me recently, when he started practicing medicine the old people with heart failures he was treating were often born in the late 1800s, but now those are all dead, and the people he's treating are more likely to have a birth years that are around 1940-1950. Which is also starting to become uncomfortably close to his own, 1960.
- A given person's definition of "old" is usually about 15 years older than they are. My boss is 65 and calls 70 year olds "young".
  
  When I started using dating apps I found 24 year olds too old. I still have that impression memorized but it's wild.
  
  Cause as you get older, you realize that a lot of the hype about people being "old" is manufactured. I'm closing in on 30 and I'm squarely in a zone I thought was "old" when I was 18. But I feel like I still have my whole life ahead of me. And despite a lot of fear mongering, I still feel healthy and ready for anything.
  And although I definitely feel like 45 is pretty old, I know that when my parents were that age they were scoffing and telling me "45 is not that old". I'm sure when I'm 60 I'll be looking at retirement and think about how it's actually not too bad to be 60 and it's the 80 year olds that are really old.
  
  With one parent who turned 80 this year and the second in their late 70s, I’ve realized there’s a difference between “elderly” and “old.” A lot of people equate the two. I think “old” always started in one’s 70s to me, even as a kid. “Elderly,” however, is not based on a number but on a physical state of being.
  My dad is elderly. He’s frail and struggling to move around much. It’s hard to watch and it’s been going on and worsening for a few years now. My mom, despite being only 3 years younger, is not at all elderly. She has more energy and vivacity than many people over 20 years her junior (hell I’m in my 30s and she can do loops around me, but I got the chronic illness genes that she didn’t have). Technically, she’s old. But no one who knows her would think of her as “elderly.”
  
  Yeah sure, everybody has different definitions and all but calling 70 year olds as young is straight up lunatic.
- Pro Tip for GenXer's: There is a point in life when you need to pick a Doctor that you like enough to die on. That will be the doctor that will take you through the last years of your life. And treat all those little miserable ailments like high blood pressure or urinary issues. Long term medical care, while it's often something that might not kill you outright, It will demand a lot of monitoring and medication to treat.
- I would of freaked him out. I had a heart attack when I was 36.
  
  You always have folks who just wanna show off 😊

I'm Gen-X, 51, and this doesn't sting too much...so like whatever. I do feel for Millenials and the elder Gen-Z though.
Imagine being Gen-Z out to buy some beer, you pull out your ID, the cashier barely glances at it and runs your credit card. You smugly say, "I guess you don't really check ID since you didn't really look at the date." The cashier responds, "I did. I saw the nineteen." Ooooff.
- it's an odd feeling to be gatekept from beer by someone who's younger than the stretch marks & grey hairs on my body and; yet; it makes me feel good to be carded nonetheless somehow.
  
  it's an odd feeling to be gatekept from beer by someone who's younger than the stretch marks & grey hairs on my body...
  slow clap
  Amazing. One of the best sentences I have read all year.
  
  I managed to go all of 22-28 never once being carded for anything.
  When I hit 30 I started getting carded for things I'd never been carded for before, even the milk bar I'd bought smokes at for 10 years, same guy and his son running it, suddenly started carding me.
  That's how I learned the ID that I'd been carrying around for 10-11 years since getting my photo ID in highschool was functionally useless, because hardly anywhere would accept it as legal ID despite it being legal ID.
  I had to keep the website for the government list of ID boolmarkef so I could show doubtful cashiers that my ID was indeed federally accepted, legal and valid ID.
  I went to try and get a different type of ID last year which is how it found out that despite being born in my country to a citizen of my country, and having my birth recorded and receiving my birth certificate. Somehow I'm not actually a citizen of my own country and I can't get a passport...so I'm trying to navigate that system but that's extra fun and confusing because I have neurodevelopmental issues and no one to help me understand what I need to to do.
  I just want to be able to buy alcohol as a person in their 30s, without having to jump through impossible hoops to prove that I'm not not 17.
  I've got smile lines and the beginnings of crows feet, I am weathered! Why am it getting carded now

One day, there will only be a handful of people from the 19 hundreds left
- The oldest person who ever lived so far made it to 122, so by 2123 they'll almost certainly all be gone.
  
  That's a verifiable old age people have lived to. Seeing how medicine and our understanding is constantly evolving, you don't think it even possible that someone would live even as long to 123?
  This is no science, if even pop-sci, but: the first person to live as long as they want may have already been born is an idea that's been floated around. The remarkable thing is that while people have believed in living forever, well, forever, this is the first time in history that it's actually possible. Not perhaps even probably, but definitely possible that medicine will develop so far.

I’m going to start saying that when asked about my birth year. “The late 1900s”
- God damn it... Just reading this feels like a gut punch!
- "Before the dawn of the millennium, when the Earth was young."
  
  In the before before times...
- Better than the mid 1900's.
- Mid 80s for me, fuck, im old
- I come from a time when our telephones were teathered to the wall and had no screens or apps at all. Later on, there were machines that would answer the phone and let someone record a message if no one was home.
  If you wanted to watch something that wasn't a movie or recording, you had to pick one of the options someone else had picked, and if you missed the time, you just missed it until someone decided it was time to play it again (at a different specific time you could miss).
  And if you did record something, you'd have to seek through the recording to find the start of it.
  Movie rentals involved going to a physical store and grabbing physical media with the content on it. If too many people wanted to rent it at a time, there just wouldn't be enough and the later ones would have to pick something else to watch. Just going to one of these rental places was a borderline magical experience full of wonder and possibility. Oh and it was considered very rude if you rented a movie but didn't seek it back to the beginning for the next person (which you'd have to physically return to the place with the physical media or you'd get charged late fees).
  And even though everyone's name, address, and phone number were published in regional "phone books", the closest thing to phone scams you'd (normally) see were prank phone calls, which were done for laughs rather than profit (albeit sometimes maliciously).
  Christians actually cared about being good people rather than thinking they can somehow be victims of an apocalypse they are trying to make happen and teleport to heaven because they've said the required amount of hail Marys and took advantage of the "just confess the horrible shit before it die and you're forgiven" loophole (and probably not thinking about what happens if the rapture ends up happening too quickly for them to confess their latest batch of sins). Actually, the crazy ones might have been around then, too, they just weren't so fucking loud back then.
  That second millennium was something else, I tell you what. You third millennium kids won't ever understand.

This is just intentionally phrased poorly to create a rise out of people. It's like referring to water as "dihydrogen monoxide".
- DHMO is a dangerous chemical!
  
  I put this on an unlabeled squirt bottle once at work. It was wrong to do because technically it's an OSHA violation for being improperly labeled because it was just in sharpie and not a standard label. But it was night shift I was bored and the bottle was already unlabeled so it was already out of compliance. Why not write on it?
  A week or so later I heard people talking about this squirt bottle that said dihydrogen monoxide. Two safety guys were there so I didn't take credit for my shenanigans based on the reception not being great.
  I said I think it's just water, but the chemical name. Ya know? Nope, they didn't get it. The kind of doubled down and started talking about things in that link because they "researched the name" and it was actually harmful.
  It was a strange experience.
- How so? I would certainly call something from 1894 to be from the "late 1800s' or late 19th century. I mean, we're a quarter of the way through this century, at some point it turns into history.
  
  Because people don't use that terminology when referring to a time period within a majority of living people's lifetime.
  
  late 1800s*
  
  When most of your life occurred in the 20th century, it looks a lot different.
- The deadliest chemical

I mean, sure, fair, it IS late 1900's, but...
- late 1900s*

To use a quote from the later part of the 1900s:
Time keeps on slippin' into the future.
- To use another from the very late 1900s
  The years start comin' and they don't stop comin'
  
  Definitely one of the songs of the very late 1900s.
  
  and they don't stop comin'
- I need to fry up an eagle 🦅

Reading that just broke my hip.

It seems awkward to me to refer to the previous century that way until you're at least halfway through the next century. Even then, that's pushing it. Basically I think that way of referring to an era implies you're over, or at least fairly close to, 100 years away from it.
- Students are often awkward
  
  Not to mention they could be on the spectrum. I could see a buddy of mine phrasing this question in this exact manner
- Early 2000's doesn't sound odd at all though.
  
  Because that’s referring the 2000’s decade. In terms of centuries, I would say we are still in the early 2000’s and that does feel odd to say.
  
  Early 2000s*
- I mean if your life started in 2005 and you didnt live through any of the 20th century, calling it the late 1900s seems totally reasonablr. You werent there when people were living through the "90s", to you its just another bygone era that people speak about in waya you'll never be able to relate to.

I regularly say "from the 20th century" when I want to emphasize the age, the irrelevance, of my lack of knowledge of something.
I don't know crap about cars, so sometimes, someone would ask me about an old one or something and I'd say "not sure, mid-20th century I think".
It's a funny way to talk about it and it almost masks the fact I just tried to get away with a 25-year window.
Although in a more rude manner I'll also say I don't care about some 20th century movie or something.
- You should check out which movies came out in 1999.
  
  Oh yeah, definitely very old stuff, huh.

I feel old and I wasn't even born on the 1900s

From the last millennium

It does depend what we're talking about. The geology of Himalaya or computer technology? One of these things didn't change much in the last forty years.
- Thete are som good stuff from before 1990s comcerning computers.
  
  No CS undergrad really needs to learn anything post 1999.

I suddenly feel like the crypt keeper
- We can't possibly be that old! I feel you've made a grave mistake
- And I am the skeleton in that crypt that turned to dust just now. (58 y.o.)

Isn't this an actual thing? Pretty sure I was told by some instructor not to use references older than a decade or two. Unless the subject is very elementary older sources are more likely to be obsolete
- Depends on the subject. Historians use a lot older materials more regularly for obvious reasons.
  
  Ofc
  
  And even then it's probably not a hard rule as much as a good heuristic: the older a source is, the more careful you should be citing it as an example of current understanding, especially in a discipline with a lot of ongoing research.
  If somebody did good analysis, but had incomplete data years ago, you can extend it with better data today. Maybe the ways some people in a discipline in the past can shed light on current debates. There are definitely potential reasons to cite older materials that generalize well to many subjects.
- Yes, the point is to see something like your birthyear or maybe that good summer in your 20s being described as too old to be relevant anymore stings
- In chemistry a lot of the foundational synthesis and work is as old as the 60s and 70s; people build on it, but in some cases those early papers said pretty much all there is to be said on a topic, so there's no reason to republish on it.
  I've had to cite papers as old as the late 30s before, because no one has ever found anything to fix or correct about their work! Pretty impressive if you ask me, given how few tools they had.

TTT... no matter how much we don't like to admit it.
- Time Takes all Titties?
  
  I think it's, "timed times time"

Someone left me a reply just yesterday with that date format. At first I was going to reply back that they must have made a typo, but then realized they weren't wrong. Ouch.
- I started a sentence in my class with “When I was born”. A student instantly chimed in and said “What in the 19’s?” And I thought in my head, of course you idiot, everybody is born in the 19’s. It still haunts me
  It still feels wrong to me, to see it written out, but spoken its different.
  I feel like it works to go with say, the 1600's, which I read naturally as the 16 hundreds. But when I see 1900 I read that as the nineteen naughts, (aughts?) because so often when people are referring to periods in the 19 hundreds, its down to the decade because so much changed between each one. Or maybe I just felt that way because I'm so old now.
  Maybe in another 25 years, it'll be far enough away that 1900's becomes 19 hundreds in my head.
  
  I've heard the nineteen naughts before, but more often that point of history was described as the turn of the century, or at least it was in the late 19s. Now turn of the century could mean 20 some years ago too. I wonder if people living in the early 1900s had this problem when discussing the early 1800s?
  
  1600s* 1900s*

I just pulled my back and broke my hips reading this, it made me feel so old 👴🏻

We will never* stop seeing accounts milking this same joke for more attention points
at least not until 2050 when they’ll change it to “early 2000s”

OOoooooOOOOOoooOOO time keeps moving FOOOooooOOOooOOORWARD!
- https://xkcd.com/1393/

Idk it’s kind of a cool feeling that people see us the way we would have seen people born in the 1890’s.
- Fuck, I'm old.

Yeah sure kid, but I was reading the news when I was 3 and your work better be damn accurate!

i dont take much stock in calendars these days. too painful

What a strange and dumb question.
Or, you know, not real.
- This is a perfectly acceptable question in a science course. Just because you don't have the experience, knowledge, or, barring those two, even just the imagination to understand how a question might apply doesn't make it strange or dumb. It does speak volumes about you, though.
  
  Exactly. Citing a psychology paper from 1912 is risky business. Young people don't know precisely when each particular science caught up to the current paradigm.
- Is it though? I definitely had teachers in middle/high school with oddball requirements like "only physical books more than 10 years old are valid sources". Total nonsense but it does happen. College is a place where you are meant to have these bad assumptions challenged and corrected. Presumably after a response they'll be better for it.
- Nothing ever happens.
- Nononono, that was 30 years ago. Can you believe it? Don't you feel old?
  (It actually feels like 60 years ago to me, but I'm weird.)
  
  It feels like an entirely different life to me.

if you've heard of amiga!

This is stupid. We're 24% through the 2000's. Get over it. How thin is your skin?
- It's hyperbole, yo. It's just funny because people born in the previous century don't really think of it as that.
- Damn I look good for being over 200 years old. I don't look a day over 130.
- through the 2000s*