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?

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/04/500-year-old-manuscript-contains-earliest-known-use-of-the-f-word/

F**k yeah!

Via Andrew Ducker.

"Sea salt" and "evaporated cane juice" are the health food industry's version of Don Draper's "toasted".

After my last trip to Israel, I promised myself that I wouldn't let more than a year go by before doing it again. That was last November, this is October, and here I am.

I'm staying at a decent, budget hotel on Allenby Street in southern Tel Aviv, and I'm upstairs from a bar and two pizza shops. I get a kick out of this area because it's so much the opposite from the pictures of Israel that you see in tourist guides. Anyway, I'm not far from the bus station, and I expect I'll catch the 405 to Jerusalem in the next couple of days.

I've been sleeping intermittently since about 6pm. They had some loud music downstairs around 1 or 2am, I think the cops made them turn it down.

I'm feeling a LOT more comfortable getting around in Hebrew, this time around. Ate breakfast at the Bialik Cafe, on the hotel's voucher, then went back there for dinner. The waitress handed me an all-Hebrew menu so I really felt like a native. It's not a kosher place and I'm pretty sure Heh-Aleph-Mem spells "ham" (which figured prominently on most of the items), so I ended up getting a green salad, and that was pretty good.

It's probably safe to say there's not much that goes on in this neighborhood that's kosher, but if I can find a place that's K, or vegetarian, it'll make my life easier. Burger Ranch isn't vegetarian but it is K, and I'm thinking of checking it out. I'm going into carnivore mode for this trip.

But, no ham. Even if the menu is in Hebrew.