Things I never thought would disappear

Things I never thought would disappear:


Stockings shaped to the leg

wool socks

unbleached muslin

plain cream

canned tomatoes  (You can get what we used to call "salad tomatoes",
but not tomatoes that are simply canned.)

There's not even a retronym for petroleum jelly, which has been
replaced by white petroleum jelly  (What's now called "white petroleum
jelly" didn't even exist, at least not where laymen could see it.)

Paperback books the size and shape of paperback books

Newspapers.  Replaced by press-release papers that are fading fast.

Old newspapers as a cheap, ubiquitous, and inexhaustable resource for
every purpose.

Definitive stamps that allowed one to mail a letter without affixing
an opinion.  I didn't even know that plain, ordinary not-special
stamps *had* a name.

Road maps.

Street signs are at risk of heading for the endangered list.  I got
very lost after one was rotated ninety degrees and nobody bothered to
twist it back.

User manuals.   Nowadays, the time to go obsolete is about half the
time it takes to write a halfway-decent manual.

The World Wide Web.  Nodes are still around, but one can't crawl from
one to another to another.

Mattresses that it's possible to tuck a sheet under.

Beds that one can sit on.

Carpet samples


--
Joy Beeson
joy beeson at centurylink dot net
http://wlweather.net/PAGEJOY/