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Skyscrapers and tenements.
When I was growing up in the 1960s and 70s, a tall urban office building was called a "skyscraper". I think I remember reading somewhere that the term originated with the advent of steel-reinforced construction techniques, which made buildings taller than about 4 stories feasible for the first time. My copy of the Oxford English Dictionary records the word as first being used in the 1880s in connection with Chicago. I don't remember hearing the word used much after about the 1970s, though, I suppose because such buildings had become so commonplace that they no longer needed a special name. In the 1980s I think the term "high-rise" became fashionable for both office and apartment buildings, and nowadays I don't even hear that term much anymore. Is the Burj Khalifa a skyscraper? A high-rise? Or just a very tall building in a world full of tall buildings?
When I was a kid, a "tenement" meant an apartment building, but not just any apartment building; it had a very specific connotation when I heard adults use it. A tenement was a run-down building in a bad part of town, probably with graffiti and broken windows and a drug dealer on the corner. My OED, which is generally pretty good with Americanisms, doesn't capture this particular usage of the word (although it does differentiate between the English and Scottish meanings of the term). But my 1981 American Heritage Dictionary captures it exactly: "a run-down low-rental aprtment or rooming house whose facilities and maintenance barely meet minimum standards". I don't know if the word is still used, with the same connotations, today. (Or maybe it's a regional thing: I grew up in New England, but I've lived on the West Coast all my adult life.)
Apart from things that actually became obsolete, or ephemeral slang expressions, what other words or phrases have fallen out of usage in your lifetime?
When I was a kid, a "tenement" meant an apartment building, but not just any apartment building; it had a very specific connotation when I heard adults use it. A tenement was a run-down building in a bad part of town, probably with graffiti and broken windows and a drug dealer on the corner. My OED, which is generally pretty good with Americanisms, doesn't capture this particular usage of the word (although it does differentiate between the English and Scottish meanings of the term). But my 1981 American Heritage Dictionary captures it exactly: "a run-down low-rental aprtment or rooming house whose facilities and maintenance barely meet minimum standards". I don't know if the word is still used, with the same connotations, today. (Or maybe it's a regional thing: I grew up in New England, but I've lived on the West Coast all my adult life.)
Apart from things that actually became obsolete, or ephemeral slang expressions, what other words or phrases have fallen out of usage in your lifetime?