random, albeit odd thoughts

[Chad Fabry]

It's refrigerator.

A few weeks ago I used the abbreviation 'frig' after much anguish due to its slightly risque' alternate definition. No one said anything but I'm sure I get laughed at a lot with no accompanying commentary.

Since then I've noticed that everyone else uses fridg.

I've also noticed that everyone says frig-i-daire instead of "frigid aire"

Does anyone else pronounce the middle e in vegetable?

[ozofprev]

I pronounce just the first of the three 'e' in vegetable. Because that's how Denny Crane does it.

Frigidaire is a brand name and is pronounced without the natural break between two words. Like Kleenex and clean excrement.[:-party]

[Les]

Around the house, we say "ve get table". My Italian wife says "sketty" for everything between noodles and macaroni.

My parents encouraged us kids to pronounce words any ole' way we wanted and made sure we knew the right way for the supper table and worship.

[hausdok]

Hmmm,

Chad, I grew up just a few hundred miles southeast of where you are and we spelled it fridge and pronounced it frij. My memory is that folks there also don't call it a "refrigerator (re-frigerator)" - they just call(and pronounce) it a 'frij' or a 'frijerater.' A kid I knew down the street that I always thought was a little weird (He was born in UK, lived in Canada for 3-4 years, then moved to the US), pronounced it "frigidayer". I used to chuckle to myself that he didn't know that Frigidaire was the brand name for a refrigerator.

Frig is short for frigging which is vulgar UK slang for f**k and f**king and is a bastardized form of the German words 'fick" and 'ficken' which mean the same thing. Is that the risqué' alternative definition to which you refer or is there another one that I've never heard?

You alright? This is some weird stuff to dwell upon. My guess is that you're just screwin' with us.

ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!!

Mike

[Brad Manor]

When my wife's parents come to visit we speak mostly Romanian in the house. The Romanian word for fridge is "frigider" which is pronounced "frigidaire".... I have since started calling all refrigerators frigidaires.

-Brad

[hausdok]

Hmmm,

Windsor, geographically proximate to Rochester. Wonder if it's the magnetic field up that way.

OT - OF!!!

M.

[homnspector]

I think "frig" is a circuit breaker label between the "dinning room" and "drier" circuits.

[SonOfSwamp]

Not that it's a big deal, but the standard bastardized misspelling for refrigerator is, "fridge."

I've put the word, "fridge" in many an HI report.

Which puts me to thinking: Before things were "refrigerated" were they simply "frigerated?" If so, why redo the "frigeration?"

WJ

[Jim Katen]

Originally posted by Chad Fabry

It's refrigerator.

A few weeks ago I used the abbreviation 'frig' after much anguish due to its slightly risque' alternate definition. No one said anything but I'm sure I get laughed at a lot with no accompanying commentary.

Since then I've noticed that everyone else uses fridg.

I've also noticed that everyone says frig-i-daire instead of "frigid aire"

Does anyone else pronounce the middle e in vegetable?

Well, what do you expect, living in frig'n Rochester.

- Jim Katen, Oregon

[Chad Fabry]

Is that the risqué' alternative definition to which you refer or is there another one that I've never heard?

That's the one I was talking about.

You alright? This is some weird stuff to dwell upon. My guess is that you're just screwin' with us.

I don't actually dwell on this stuff. But some things need to be answered.

[Terence McCann]

Originally posted by SonOfSwamp

Which puts me to thinking: Before things were "refrigerated" were they simply "frigerated?" If so, why redo the "frigeration?"

WJ

Reminds me of the early George Carlin stuff. A hot water heater - why does hot water need heating?

[hausdok]

Originally posted by Terence McCann

A hot water heater - why does hot water need heating?

It doesn't, but it does need reheating. []

OT - Of!!!

M.

[Jack Ahern]

I suppose "ice box" is pushing it. I remember in the 40's when I was a munchkin. Ah--- the good old days.[:-party] Yeah Sox--Go Pats

[hausdok]

Yep,

I still remember the Ice Man's horse-drawn wagon, tongs, and those huge blocks of ice. Can't remember them still being around by the time I started kindergarten, though.

OT - OF!!!

M.

[emalernee]

I still find myself calling it a "Ice Box", cause that's what my mommy and daddy called it. In the written report it becomes a refrigerator.

My daughter and son-in-law just left for England to do a four year stint as campus ministers and are finding the language differences amusing. Don' t call pants "pants" over there or you will be directed to the underwear department.

Ezra Malernee

Canton, Ohio

[Richard Moore]

I abandoned all hope for the English language when I crossed the pond many years ago.

Ask a teenager how they would text "fridge". We are raising a generation that can only type abbreviations, using their thumbs, preferably while driving with the bass shaking the windows. Ain't nuttin gonna b spelt rite in a few yrs.

BTW, I have pants on under my trousers!

[Richard Stanley]

We had an ice box.

We had a combination wood / kerosene stove in the kitchen.

We had a coal furnace - the guy came and dumped coal into the basement coal bin.

We had an outhouse, but, not very far out - I think it was attached to the house.

We had kerosene lamps. - I don't recall anything electric, allthough the neighbors had electricity.

We had a salt barrel to preserve meat.

We put boards around the perimeter of the house/cellar and filled the space with leaves in the winter.

All of this post ice age - still had global warming!

This was in northern Vermont - early 40's

[AHI in AR]

Well, if we're going to let this thread wander aimlessly and talk about the "old" days, here's my contribution. I was listening to a 9 year old boy the other day and he told a friend that he sounded "like a broken record player." I was pretty sure he'd never heard or seen an actual vinyl record on a turntable to have mangled the phrase that way.

My kids were fascinated when I dug out my old turntable (from 1988) and set it back up a few years ago. They stood there transfixed, watching it go around and around. . .then they went back to their Nintendo. Now that's something I just don't get at all.

[Bonnie Trenga]

My brother, who's 35, is changing careers (from writer/stay-at-home dad to med student). His lab partner was younger than his calculator. Anyway, this lab partner asked him if he used to listen to those big black round things. Ouch!

[Brad Manor]

Wait a minute, I'm 35..................... I thought I was young and cool.

-Brad

[Erby]

Here's some for ya!

=====

'Hey Dad,' one of my kids asked the other day, 'What was your favorite fast food when you were growing up?' 'We didn't have fast food when I was growing up,' I explained -- all the food was slow!'' We ate it at a place called 'At Home.''

I went on to explain how 'Grandma cooked every day and when Grandpa got home from work, we sat down together at the dining room table, and if I didn't like what she put on my plate I was allowed to sit there until I did like it.'

By this time, the kid was laughing so hard I was afraid he was going to suffer serious internal damage, so I didn't tell him the part about how I had to have permission to leave the table.

But here are some other things I would have told him about my childhood if I figured his system could have handled it:

Some parents NEVER owned their own house, wore Levis , set foot on a golf course, traveled out of the country or had a credit card. In their later years they had something called a revolving charge card. The card was good only at Sears Roebuck. Or maybe it was Sears AND Roebuck. Either way, there is no Roebuck any more. Maybe he died.

My parents never drove me to soccer practice. This was mostly because we never had heard of soccer. I had a bicycle that weighed probably 50 pounds, and only had one speed, (slow). We didn't have a television in our ho use until I was 11, but my grandparents had one before that. It was, of course, black and white, but they bought a piece of colored plastic to cover the screen. The top third was blue, like th e sky, and the bottom third was green, like grass. The middle third was red. It was perfect for programs that had scenes of fire trucks riding across someone's lawn on a sunny day. Some people had a lens taped to the front of the TV to make the picture look larger.

I was 13 before I tasted my first pizza, it was called 'pizza pie.' When I bit into it, I burned the roof of my mouth and the cheese slid off, swung down, plastered itself against my chin and burned that, too. It's still the best pizza I ever had.

We didn't have a car until I was 15. Before that, the only car in our family was my grandfather's Ford. He called it a 'machine.'

I never had a telephone in my room. The only phone in the house was in the living room and it was on a party line. Before you could dial, you had to listen and make sure some people you didn't know weren't already using the line.

Pizzas were not delivered to our home. But MILK was.

All newspapers were delivered by boys and all boys delivered newspapers. I delivered a newspaper, six days a week. It cost 7 cents a paper, of which I got to keep 2 cents. I had to get up at 4 AM every morning. On Saturday, I had to collect the 42 cents from my customers. My favorite customers were the ones who gave me 50 cents and told me to keep the change. My least favorite customers were the ones w ho seemed to never be home on collection day.

Movie stars kissed with their mouths shut. At least, they did in the movies. Touching someone else's tongue with yours was called French kissing and they didn't do that in movies. I don't know what they did in French movies. French movies were dirty and we weren't allowed to see them.

If you grew up in a generation before there was fast food, you may want to share some of these memories with your children or grandchildren. Just don't blame me if they bust a gut laughing.

Growing up isn't what it used to be, is it?

MEMORIES from a friend:

My Dad is cleaning out my grandmother's house (she died in December) and he brought me an old Royal Crown Cola bottle. In the bottle top was a stopper with a bunch of holes in it. I knew immediately what it was, but my daughter had no idea. She thought they had tried to make it a salt shaker or something. I knew it as the bottle that sat on the end of the ironing board to 'sprinkle' clothes with water because we didn't have steam irons. Man, I am old.

How many do you remember?

Head lights dimmer switches on the floor.

Ignition switches on the dashboard.

Heaters mounted on the inside of the fire wall.

Real ice boxes.

Pant leg clips for bicycles without chain guards.

Soldering irons you heat on a gas burner.

Using hand signals for cars without turn signals.

Older Than Dirt Quiz: Count all the ones that you remember not the ones you were told about Ratings at the bottom.

1 . Blackjack chewing gum

2. Wax Coke-shaped bottles with colored sugar water

3. Candy cigarettes

4. Soda pop machines that dispensed glass bottles

5. Coffee shops or diners with tableside juke boxes

6. Home milk delivery in glass bottles with cardboard stoppers

7. Party lines

8. Newsreels before the movie

9. P.F. Flyers

10. Butch wax

11. Telephone numbers with a word prefix (OLive-6933)

12. Peashooters

13. Howdy Doody

14. 45 RPM records

15. S&H Green Stamps

16 Hi-fi's

17. Metal ice trays with lever

18. Mimeograph paper

19 Blue flashbulb

20. Packards

21. Roller skate keys

22. Cork popguns

23. Drive-ins

24. Studebakers

25. Wash tub wringers

If you remembered 0-5 = You're still young

If you remember ed 6-10 = You are getting older

If you remembered 11-15 = Don't tell your age,

If you remembered 16-25 = You're older than dirt!

====

I might be older than dirt but those memories are the best part of my life.

[Terence McCann]

The curious case of the misplaced thread.

[Jerry Simon]

Originally posted by hausdok

Yep,

I still remember the Ice Man's horse-drawn wagon, tongs, and those huge blocks of ice. Can't remember them still being around by the time I started kindergarten, though.

OT - OF!!!

M.

Remember "Six finger, six finger, man alive, how did I ever get along with five!"

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And, I really feel old when this is my recent hi-def TV purchase...

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[Les]

crap! not even a little bit of a challenge!

[Chad Fabry]

Hey Jerry...you should have been a clarinet player!