Millennials reveal 25 phrases they would always hear growing up that today's kids won't know

Over the years, changes in generations also brought different language and communication styles into use. The phrases that one uses on a daily basis sound alien to the next generation. Each age group has its improvised and revamped vocabulary to communicate in the dynamic world. While boomers and other generations mostly relied on whole words and proper sentences, younger generations like Gen Z opt for shorter versions of words to convey their emotions. 

A user on Reddit, u/Puzzleheadedswim6291, called on millennials and asked them to share phrases from their time that are no longer relevant today. As teenagers and youth back in the day, millennials had a lot of common phrases and terms to communicate in situations varying from using the family telephone to delivering pickup lines. In the comments section, people have shared vivid examples that are a gush of nostalgia. Here are 25 of the best replies. 

1. Telephone shenanigans 

"'I got it!' When the house phone rang." -u/KayDid749. "Hang up the other line! I got it!" -u/Historical_Salt1943. "Mom! she’s still on, listening!! Make her hang up!"-u/KatyDid749. "We had a party line when I was a kid, so it was often that the neighbor would also be on the line, listening." -u/Drawtaru.

2. The mandatory calls and etiquette 

"Having to talk to the father when you called your crush." -u/22midnightsamurai22. "Practicing before you call, 'Hi, is ____ able to talk please?' The stress!" -u/meliburrelli. "Also, 'Is Johnny there?' When the parent picks up the home phone." -u/Rosewoodtrainwreck. "The dreaded 'May I ask who is calling?'" -u/KatyDid749. "I read in a kids' etiquette book in 5th grade to say, 'Hi, this is [my name] from school, may I please speak to [Jane/John Doe]?' Once I started doing this, the parents never said no." -u/Pizzawithpep.

3. "Hit the pavement" 

"My dad would tell me to 'hit the pavement' (I mean, you have to, but yeesh, talk about dated.) 'Hand in your resume to the hiring manager and greet them with a handshake and do a follow-up call as soon as you get home. Call back at the same time every day. If you can't get the hiring manager, keep track of who you talked to. They will be impressed by your tenacity.'" -u/throw_conerned. "Just go, drop off resumes at random places/fill out applications! The manager will give you one if you ask. This is the best way to find a job!" -u/CatherineConstance.

4. DVDs and gaming 

"Eject disc one and insert disc two to continue the installation."-u/bodhemon. "The joy of installing a game for an hour and the anticipation of waiting to play." -u/maidenburma. "Eject disc 5 and insert disc 6 to continue installation." -u/iamdperk. "Installation failed, please insert installation disc 1." -u/bodhemon.

5. The "information highway" 

"Describing the internet as an 'information super highway.'" -u/TheKnightsTippler. "The world wide web." -u/Burnedthelasone9. "For a while, it was difficult to even explain the difference between the world wide web and the internet. But now almost all individuals and even a few businesses contain their online presence only within a tiny number of social media sites and interact with the internet more and more through mobile apps rather than web browsers." -u/Episaxis.

6. The joy of receiving mail!

"You've got mail!" -u/Nate16. "Going into the chatrooms and typing '{S Welcome' and '{S Gotmail' so that everyone in the chatroom heard their computer go 'Welcome! You've Got Mail!' regardless of their inbox status." -u/WTF253com. "I set that sound as a custom email notification for my phone." -u/TarkusEdge. "Yes! I was just getting into my dating years and it was so exciting to get an email from a chica!" -u/Nate16.

7. "Look it up" 

"We'll look it up when we get home." -u/Wazzen. "'Look it up!' I was sent to the physical book dictionary or encyclopedia to look up my answer whenever I asked my mom too many questions or a question she didn't know the answer to." -u/whopping_otter_eaters. "I still have a lag between 'I don't know' and then realizing 'Oh wait, I can Google it right this second.'" -u/FiliaDei.

8. From MapQuest to Google Maps

"Did you remember to print the directions to our destination?" -u/dexterstrife. "And it was always from Mapquest and it was never right." -u/Background-Budget293. "That was where the 'quest' part of Mapquest came into play." -u/robbviously. "And we'd just learn all the roads and could figure out how to get places based on our general understanding of where stuff was. Now I feel so pathetically tethered to Google Maps." -u/DrAlkibiades.

9. "Be kind, rewind"

"Be kind, rewind." -u/Gubble_Buppie. "I feel like the notion of having to rewind movies using a physical process must be so foreign to kids today." -u/didntlikedefaultname. "What's funny is that the terminology is still the same. 'Rewind' literally meant that the tape within the cassette was rewound from one wheel to the other so the video could be viewed from the beginning. We still say 'rewind' to describe going back to a previous place in a digital video with no tape." -u/Diiirty.

10. Spot on comebacks 

"Talk to the hand (because the face ain't listening)" -u/YOLOSwagBRO69. "Or 'talk to the bo**y cause the hand’s off-duty.'" -u/Jamesicus7. "Talk to my butt because he’s the only one who gives a crap" -u/mclovingts. "'Talk to the hand because the face doesn't give a damn' - is what I grew up with." -u/Palmtree2NYC. 

11. Precious TV time 

“'The commercials are ending!' Or just the simple 'it’s back on!' from your sibling as you sprint back from the bathroom/kitchen for your show." -u/Druxun. "It just struck me that I no longer have to time my bathroom breaks with commercials. If someone told younger me that someday, I could either pause a show or take it with me, I'd have thought they were nuts." -u/LaprasLass.

12. Hiding identity in style 

"18/f/ca. I love Britney Spears and Em." u/metallaholic. "'Always 18/F/CA' 'Yeah, truthfully 13/F/VA.' We were warned not to give out information to strangers on the internet, yet there we were, talking to random people in chatrooms... And nowadays we order strangers from the internet and hop in their cars or take food from them." -u/cyclonesinapolicebox.

13. Newspapers over Google

"Check the newspaper for movie times and what's in theatres." -u/ixdriver. "Or call Movie Line!" -u/bonerforcrosstabs. "Yeah, I would call the line and listen to the whole showtimes list til I got the one I was looking for. And then I probably wrote it down with the pen and paper, kept by the landline phone, so I wouldn’t forget."-u/EarlyAccident2160. "Or using the TV guide to see what's on TV that night (the printed TV guide)" -u/ToastyourAvocados.

14. Mental math

"You won't always have a calculator." -u/Wizard_of_Claus. "If my teachers told me that learning stuff in school was not for the utility, but to get my brain working in some minimal way to function, I’d probably have gone with it a lot more." -u/true_window_9389. "We have high schoolers that can't multiply up to 9. It's not about 'not having a calculator.' It's about being able to do the simplest of calculations you need in everyday life in your head, quickly and accurately." -u/dirtynj.

15. The immeasurable bond between the internet and the phone 

"Get off the internet!! I need to use the phone!" -u/Apuzzleheadedswim6921. "I miss the internet being less accessible." -u/ACaffeinatedWandress. "I miss phones being less accessible. Not the internet on them, just the expectation of being reachable." -u/quovneob. "My dad broke his leg while on a jog. Slipped and fell. I was on Polly Pocket online. He hopped back home. I didn’t play online for like 6 months after that. I felt so bad." -u/mongoosedog12.

16. CDs over everything 

"Don't touch the CD with your fingers." -u/istillhavetoomuchtime. "Don't put floppy discs in your pocket." -u/metalloholic. "Hey, grab the toothpaste, I need to clean this CD!" -u/kittifizz. "I work in government. I was cleaning out old files the other day. I found a 1.44MB floppy disk and realized that even though the government is notoriously archaic, we didn't have a way to play it."  -u/BDTS. "I’m amazed that people damaged their CDs so badly. So easy to just put a finger in the center and on the edge." -u/MegaAscension.

17. Cursive vs typing

"'You will have to write everything in cursive.' I am only 30 and they stopped teaching cursive the year below me." -u/dogmom2013. "I'm 28, and I remember learning cursive in 3rd grade as a novelty. It was like a 'Here's how to write it just in case you have to read your grandma's birthday card at some point.'" -u/Oscillatingballofsweat. "I had mandatory cursive but only one typing class in school. They didn’t offer typing anywhere else!" -u/lhbwlkr.

18. Ideal plans

"Okay, put your Pogs away, we're going to K-mart." -u/chefman64. "And maybe if you're good, we'll stop off at Circuit City, Toys R' Us or KB Toys on the way home." -u/A_Stones_Throw. "I still remember the day my sister and I bought Pokémon Red and Blue from Toys R Us because they were running a BOGO $10 off special on Game Boy games. Parents thought we were nuts." -u/A_Stones_Throw. "Maybe we can stop at Blockbuster and rent a video on the way home too.” -u/Tihsdrib.

19. The art of film and photography 

"I need to develop this role of film." -u/PlanetLondon. "I need to return some videotapes." -u/BettyDare. "Going to Walgreens to get your pictures." -u/noopinionsallowedonR. "I just told my daughter all about this this morning! Her little mind was completely blown that we couldn’t look at our pictures until someone developed them weeks later."  -u/alrightmaam. "I still have a film roll in a camera from my freshman year of college in 2006 that I never finished because that was the year I finally switched to a point-and-shoot digital camera." -u/OrifielM.

20. "Come home when the streetlights are on" 

"Come home when the streetlights are on." -u/BabasFavorite. "Being a kid before cell phones was amazing." -u/22MidnightSamurai22. "When you had to jump on your bike and ride 2 blocks to see if your friend was home." -u/Hank_Scorpio_MD. "We had walkie-talkies so our parents could contact us, or we could contact them." -u/MoogleLady. "I always got 'come home when you're hungry for dinner.'" -u/bodai1986.

21. "Don't sit so close to the TV"

"'Don't sit so close to the TV.' Console TVs are long gone and modern set-ups never have your screen on the floor, so sitting close really isn't much of an option anymore." -u/ofmiceandmeese. "Go put this on top of the TV." -u/tatotornado. "I was a nerd so for me it was 'no reading in low lighting!' I fear my mother was right." -u/ihbwlkr. "Now I bet the majority of us spend hours every week, if not every day, within 2' of a monitor."-u/andrewclarkson.

22. Don't believe the internet

"'You can't believe anything you read on the internet,' claimed my Baby Boomer parents before they discovered the joy of voluntarily radicalizing themselves on Facebook." -u/boldestkobold. "'Where do you get your propaganda?' as a proxy question for 'How old are you?'" -u/Strawberry_Obvious. "It's so weird. We grew up assuming that the internet was filled with lies and scams, and now we have to be the ones teaching our parents how to avoid them." -u/drmojo90210.

23. Good old remarks

"Up your butt and around the corner." -u/kurtisbmusic. "We gotta bring back 'up your butt and around the corner.'" -u/Joyma. "I once heard someone say 'up your ass around the corner to California' and I decided I'm stealing that." -u/SpiciestSprite. "My family and I always said this so much that it’s now turned into where anyone asks where something is, we turn to say 'I know where it is' and for whatever reason, we all giggle every time because we know." -u/Wisteria357.

24. Millennial fears

"Dude, this-  the Bermuda Triangle, aliens and quicksand is what kept me up with anxiety at night as a kid!" -u/belthezare. "I thought quicksand was going to play a much larger role in my life." -u/itsagarbageaccount.  "When was the last time you heard anything about the Bermuda triangle?" -u/beefpoet.

25. "It was the bomb"

"It was the bomb."  -u/helloKrisKris. "I used to have an email address with @bombdiggity.com! It was the shiznit."-u/ReginaCampfire. "We just say 'bomb' now." -u/Opie67.