"What are some 90s terms that are no longer used today?"
So let's talk about it. What don't you hear anymore? Have you found yourself comfort-watching Living Single and realizing Khadija sounds like an alien?
No? Just me?
Multiple Deaths Happening Here
"... NOT!!!!"
- chichi_benson
"I only ever hear Borats voice now when reading the word NOT"
- stephen_spielgirth
"Someone on here pointed out to me that the modern version of 'NOT!!!' is 'said no one ever.' "
"Which is fascinating since it shows how humor has evolved over the last 20-30 years."
- BW_Bird
"I mean… 'said no one ever' died out years ago too. It feels like memes had that phrase everywhere just yesterday."
"Even the word “web” in reference to the internet has almost completely disappeared."
- thomthehipposlayer
"The bomb dot com."
- kramerica_intern
"When I was doing back end development for corporate websites back in the early 2000's, lots of enterprise developers were saying 'www' as 'dub dub dub.' lol"
- cardcomm
Okay Which Part Are We Talking To And Why?
"Talk to the hand."
- llcucf80
"Talk to the elbow because the hand ain't worth the extension."
- allanmonroe
"I always did 'Talk to the booty, cause the hand's off duty.' "
- Lwmons
"Talk to the hand cuz the face ain’t listening!"
- Ri-chanRenne
"Talk to the hand talk to the butt talk to the man from Pizza Hut."
- SirRemington159
"Radical" Used To Be A Good Thing
"I still say things are 'rad,' but I haven’t said 'radical' or heard the term 'radical' used in a 'that’s cool' context since like ‘95 or ‘96."
- ghosts-go-boo
"I use 'rad' frequently but I’ve found Northern California is hella welcome to all kinds of slang, man."
- beard_lover
"I only use 'radical' to describe political radicalism, but every time I do I always think of the group I'm talking about busting some phat moves at the skate park."
- MarvinLazer
"Yeah I only hear 'radical' brought up in history or math classes right now."
- KoopaTrooper5011
Posing As A Hater? Cringe.
"Being a 'poser' was THE worst insult where I grew up, people were often criticized for being too big for their boots and dressing like rock stars."
"Nowadays, with social media etc, everyone is invested in their own brand management and if you think it’s cringe, you’re a ‘hater.’ "
- AGuerillaGorilla
"20 years from now when someone asks this same question on this sub, I'm sure 'cringe' is gonna be one of the answers."
- dbigya00
"I still feel like poser is a pretty solid insult. It's all about the delivery, you gotta dress it up a bit."
- thedoomdevice
We're Deeply Uninformed
"My wife got made fun of by our friends kid for using the term 'word on the street.' "
"It really blew his mind when we told him we needed the '4-1-1' on why it’s not cool anymore."
- Treibemj
"People still say 'word on the street.' It Still shows up in new rap songs."
"That’s as close as I’m getting to the streets, but those young men seem like they know what they’re talking about."
- MrBurnz99
Guac Is Still Extra
"All that and a bag of chips!"
- Wishyouamerry
"I use that at Chipotle. Sometimes I get the "did you really just say that?" look."
- BitPoet
"My mom says a version of that to my cat because my cat gets so excited when I walk into a room."
"My mom's like, 'she's not all that and a bag of catnip!' "
- StarWars_Girl_
Timing Troubles
"Call me after 7 when it’s free."
- False-Boysenberry673
"Alright yo man, you’re wasting my minutes! I’ll call you at night."
- temp7412369
"Oh man this one really takes me back."
"When I was a kid and I wanted to play telephone with my friends and my mom always reminded me to call after 7."
- batyoung1
To Doy? Or Not To Doy?
"No Doy"
- XxBoognishxX
"I always loved that yelling DOY meant the same thing as yelling NO DOY."
"It is truly one of the great mysteries of the universe."
- JohnSnowsPump
"I had to say it to remember it. Lol"
- ironh19
"I discovered there’s a whole segment of the population that use 'Duh Doy' — which is an inferior usage of the term, in my opinion."
- kula_shakur
"I say doy but I spell it doi. wasn't alive in the 90s though"
- bebedumpling
Suffix Situations
"-meister"
- papachon
"I work with a guy who's last name is Burmeister, I always call him 'The Burr-meister' like a 90s surfer, it annoys him."
- careater
"Wait are we not saying that any more? Douchemeister."
- alexrt87
"Is there anything more 90s than the Stiffmeister?"
- Zal_17
"My best friend from high school in the early 2000s is still 'Bakermeister' in my phone lol"
- weissingaround1
Aight, fly honies and homies - yall heard Reddit. Now it's on you to tell us what's up.
Oh, the 90's. So many of us, especially millennial's, have an affinity to the nostalgia of that decade. It's hard not to love the retro aesthetics, compact discs and Sony Discmans, the jazz blue and purple pattern that was on all of the cups, and dial-up internet.
Well... maybe not the dial-up part. But if that sound isn't burned into all of our memories!
Some of these things we just can't do anymore, because they simply do not exist (RIP Blockbuster). It's sad, but true. The most we can do is hold tight to those fond moments of our childhood.
Redditor tjapp93 wanted to take a trip down memory lane:
"What's something from the 90s you miss?"
Let's take a stroll through the past together.
Sitting in a Pizza Hut.
"Sit in Pizza Hut."
"I was on vacation in the mountains up state and they had one in town. I got to have pizza in an actual Pizza Hut for the first time since the late 90's early 2000's. We had one outside of town and then that closed and they made a to go one that ended up also closing. Now I can have one of the local places or Papa John's or Domino's."
"The target nearby does have the mini Pizza Hut pizzas and some of their appetizers. It's hardly the same as getting it from a Pizza Hut itself."
"One of my guilty pleasure is Pizza Hut pizza buffet. Haven't been in years and my girlfriend doesn't like it but that's okay I don't need to be there on the reg anyway. That Tony hawk demo disc though..."
"I was moving cross country and called a friend to bring me my toolset he borrowed so I could put it in my checked baggage. He never showed up and I thought well, that's that. Sitting on the plane, the stewardess walked up and said are you '____ ' I said yes, and she just handed me my 120 piece toolset complete with hammer, socket wrench, screwdrivers, carpet knife and explained the friend had arrived at the gate just after I boarded. Even back then I was like...'seriously?'"
"I remember I was flying home after my first year of college, where I had taken some art classes."
"When I finally got home I was looking in my backpack and forgot that I had left some art supplies in there including a couple of box cutters (the weapon used on 9/11). Security said nothing."
"Another time I was seeing one of my friends off at the airport as they were going to an out of state college. I arrived to the airport with my other friend and his little brother who had brought a toy rifle with him to the airport for some reason. Anyway, we were super late and rushing to the gate so we could say goodbye to my friend who was leaving. The little brother was too small so my buddy picked him up so we could sprint to the gate. In the process his brother hands me the toy rifle. So there we are the 3 of us running through the airport and I'm holding what looks like a rifle. This was before the security checkpoint and I realized this might not look good but I'm in a rush so I just chuck the rifle behind some chairs. I literally just threw it behind some airport seats."
"Nobody said anything, but I'm still surprised security wasn't called."
"The summer before 9/11 my father and I flew to Cincinnati for a national science competition thing I qualified for. While there we decided to drive into Indiana. One of the first things we noticed were firework stores (not stands, but stores)."
"My family ran a couple of firework stands back in Texas, where we are from, for like 30+ years until our town got too big to sell them."
"So, being firework people, we stopped and discovered that not only did they sale fireworks year round (not just 11 days in June/July and 13 days in December as is the season in Texas), they also sold original 'bottle rockets.'"
"These are the rockets on a stick that have a body about as big as a standard firecracker (not quite two inches) and are about 10 inches overall. They had been illegal to sale in Texas since 1981 and not a firework season had passed in my entire life where I wasn't asked if we had any, and then asked again and told they were 'cool' so I could trust them."
"These things were like the holy grail to 18 year old me. They sold them by the gross at about $6 per. My dad and I figured we could put 8 gross into my duffel bag, so that's what we bought. Even bank then we didn't know if they would make it back on the plane."
"We arrive at DFW airport and nervously wait in the baggage area. After a few moments, out comes my black duffel bag. I grab it, open it up, and the bottle rockets had made the flight."
"So, what I miss about the 90s is being able to put explosives in your checked luggage and transporting them home."
"Ugh agreed. I had to stop drinking with one of my friends because she'd ALWAYS record everyone doing anything even remotely fun or goofy and it'd be on snapchat or Facebook within seconds. Like, I just wanna get a little drunk and dance and have a good time with my friends, I don't want every person I hardly know seeing me let loose."
"l never forget watching a last day of school video from June 2001 and while there's a lot of differences especially in style and fashion, hands down the biggest difference was the relative novelty all the students and teachers gave to the video camera. like, only this one guy decided to bring in the camera, there were no phones or other recording devices at the time so it was so cute seeing someone walk up to him and then their eyes go wide and they say 'Ooo! a camera!' Being recorded was not the norm. And shoot dude I'm in my late twenties still but June 2001 feels like yesterday to me time just f*cking moves on ya."
"I remember being in high school around 2003/2004 when some of my peers were just starting to get cellphones. My friends and I all laughed at the 'Spoiled rich kids' with their cellphones, all of us claiming we'd never be like that. A year or two later, we all had cell phones."
"How old does it make me when I remember kids getting their first pagers? They had them clipped to the inside of their jeans so you could only see the back of the clip exposed. Pagers were the sh*t."
Now we aren't even talking the 90s, this is just in the last 20 years.
"This is the example I use. When my son was born in 2007, I had a digital camera. I had to take the camera home that night, upload pictures to my PC, and email them out to people. When my daughter was born in 2011, I did all of that in the delivery room on my phone."
"I was in 5th grade in 2005 and was part of a photography club that year."
"Had a cheap digital camera that was my prized possession. It was a pain in the a** to plug that into the laptop and upload my photos using a dedicated software that I had to install from a disk that came with the CD. And the memory card limited me to like, 100 photos."
"Nowadays my phone has a substantially higher resolution and memory, by orders of magnitude. And I can just upload them to the cloud or social media in a minute."
"Movies. A lot my favorite movies are mid-sized thrillers from the 90's. A lot of big actors, but not huge spectacles.
"That segment is dying out. You have huge blockbusters for international markets, some prestige period pieces, comedies and indies. And then there are TV shows."
"But the sort of 'Harrison Ford's wife is missing, again' films are severely lacking theses days."
"I sometimes ask myself if movies from the 90s were so great because they were just a part of my childhood, or they're actually special by objective standards."
"As you alluded to, I really do think there was a style of film they put out more in the 90s. I can't exactly put my finger on what that style is, though."
"I feel like it was just a simpler style of storytelling. For me, watching a 90s movie feels like hearing a really engaging story from a good friend. Nothing flashy, nothing in 4 parts. There's some good music on in the background and I'm just enjoying something humans have enjoyed for eons."
"Oooh the cards are the worst. You have to buy one card per person or everyone has to stay together to use the card, and each card has an activation fee!"
"Instead of inserting x amount of coins into an arcade machine to play, arcade chains found it better if people had to buy cards with credits in them, so you can buy credits with cash that are loaded onto the card instead of turning paper money into coins. That way, you can carry your card and bring it to multiple locations. If I had to guess why this happened, It's probably because arcades shifted to redemption games and prizes that are damn near impossible to get."
"Also, people are acutely aware of what a game costs when you have to plug in five tokens. You can tell how much play time you're getting by how fast your pockets get empty. On a card, you never really know what the game costs and how much you have left. You go full tilt until it is gone."
"The other thing is a lot of us will add a dollar to two just to spend the entire card or people walk out with 50 or 75 cents on a card and never come back. That's real money when a thousand people or more a year do it."
"Arcades died specifically because home console graphics caught up to them. The PS1 and Saturn got close enough that the differences started feeling minor and then with the Dreamcast and PS2 (and the rise of online gaming) it was all over. It's not as though Dave and Busters and Round One are unpopular, but you go for experiences that don't translate as well to home, which means the few modern arcade games are either steering wheel racers, light gun games, or peripheral-based rhythm games."
"I'm so glad that the dumba** sh*t I said as a teenager is hidden away on some defunct video game forums under a screen name that isn't even close to my real name. I feel for today's kids, who know that if they ever do anything noteworthy with their lives, someone will dig through their old tweets and be like 'Yeah but look at the sh*t this guy said as a freshman in high school.'"
"Walking 20 minutes to a mates house knocking his door then finding out he's not in. It was like rolling the dice."
"Various issues to 'just use the landline' - a lot of people didn't answer their phones anyway, some people left them off the hook sometime as they didn't want to be bothered. Some friends wouldn't hear the phone if they were in their room listening to music/playing SNES/Megadrive, some people had sisters who were always on the phone so calling just got engaged tone. That's just the issues I can think of right now."
"If I really wanted to hang out with a particular friend and they weren't home, that meant it was time to hop on the bike and ride by the next 4-5 most likely places he would be."
"Or when you could hear kids playing and you'd just bolt out the door hoping it was so-and-so coming your way. No better feeling when your two best buds were coming down the road on their bikes."
Though it is so sad to see these things go, we can still carry those fond memories with us. Who knows, with the way trends work, maybe these once popular things will come back around again.
"Want to "know" more? Never miss another big, odd, funny, or heartbreaking moment again. Sign up for the Knowable newsletter here."
It's pretty ironic to think just how short-lived YOLO was.
So many aspects of popular culture are mere flashes in the pan.
We buy things for way too much to wear them for a summer. We learn particular dances before Homecoming to make sure we're not out of the loop.
We even become passionate about particular philosophies for only a hot second.
It can be valuable to take a moment to reflect on those bizarre trends that we took to like a youth cult. It's humbling to reflect on how impressionable and dumb we all used to be.
"That period in the late 90's and early 00's where neon inflatable furniture was popular." -- smcsleazy
"Two dudes in my dorm got a bunch of those things, stuck Velcro on the bottom and on the ceiling, and had easy chairs that stashed completely out of the way when they weren't in use. F***ing brilliant." -- dustyrags
Artistic Process
"That era during the 2000s/early 2010s when every popular song got an Alvin and the chipmunks cover. Still can't believe we survived that." -- Teerevolve
"That's on a 30 year cycle. 1950's: original chipmunks have albums and puppet appearances."
"1980's: Saturday morning cartoon (actually pretty good) done by the original guys son."
"2000's also the son's property, but I think he licensed it instead of doing it himself."
"Keep an eye out for a revival on whatever people are into in 2030 or so." -- mike_d85
A Good Year for Dads
"The weird obsession with mustaches in 2013 or whatever year it was" -- antictrash
"Don't forget bacon, the default subs were all mustaches and bacon back then" -- KargonBloodrich
"My son was born that year and his uncle bought him a binky with a mustache on it at Spencer's. He looked hilarious." -- jebzz12
The Single Best Trend for Core Training
"Planking. That trend where people would post pictures lying down in odd places." -- PlayerObscured
"My favorite example of this was one of someone lying across the humps on a McDonalds sign." -- BlueManedHawk
"I still remember when our high school history teacher would be doing the latest trend pose when we came into class."
"As we'd walk in, he'd be planking or Tebowing on his desk. Sounds cringey, but we all had a good laugh." -- Heruuna
A Blast From the Past About a Blast From the Past
"When swing music and swing dancing was really popular for like 6 months in 1998." -- Clintman
"That damn gap commercial with Jump Jive and Wail caused me to buy a $95 pair of khakis that I didn't need" -- krezgobop
"It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing..." -- ACorania
"You know, I was sold on their campaign. I even guest wrote on my friend's blog defending it and how people should just shut up if they have nothing nice to say."
"And then the dude who started it ran around naked and that was the end of that." -- Fishwhocantswim
Worldwide Beehive
"The vuvuzela. Everyone had one of those 10 years ago." -- crayul
Picture yourself as a kid. What are the things you see? Do you see yourself clutching a Donatello Ninja Turtles figurine underneath your poster of 98 Degrees? Do you maybe see a coloring book, or a Lisa Frank bag, or a trapper keeper?
So many small things can easily remind you of childhood. And the nostalgia bomb is intense, but often on the most random things. Us 90s kids are the kings and queens of being immediately nostalgic when we see anything from the 90s. A simple candy necklace is enough to trip our memories.
I used to love playing video games and playing outside without the anxiety of bills, cooking, work, etc. literally just got to have fun without that buzz in the back of your head telling you that you could be using your time better.
Time moved much slower. Summer felt like it lasted forever. And while the wait to Christmas Day was torturous, now it sneaks up on me and I feel like I never have enough time to get ready
I recently made a list of all the cartoon shows I could remember and downloaded what I could find, now every saturday morning I make myself cereal and shuffle between all shows' episodes so idk what comes next. Sometimes I get reruns but that happened back then too!
So far I have Batman beyond, cow and chicken, duck dodgers, grim adventures of billy and mandy, megas XLR, ozzy & drix, static shock, teen titans, tom and jerry, and X-men. I'm sure there's a ton im missing and I cant remember them though!
Hearing my grandpa's stories... waking up in the morning and looking forward to the day, and not being wracked by anxiety and depression.... getting a sandwich from my favorite long-shut deli after school.... turning on the news and not fearful of what I'd see and hear.... having more energy..... not being addicted to the internet and social media and smart phones.... where do I stop?
Sometimes my parents would let me sleep in one of their t-shirts. The shirts were big enough that I could squat down and pull the shirt down over my knees, down to the floor. So, I would squat down over a heater vent and pull the shirt down to the floor and tuck it under my toes. Then I'd pull my arms and head into the shirt and hold the back of the shirt to the floor with my hands and have my own tiny little heat tent.
I find it a bit strange but I kind of miss the commercials such as the Shirley Temple collection or Recess Puffs that came on when I was trying to watch Spongebob or something. I used to find those commercials so annoying as a kid because they came on at what seemed to be the worst times but since I stopped using cable in favor of streaming services I found myself missing them quite a bit.
I miss the joy of discovering something cool on tv. Now I can stream or find anything that I can think of to watch but I still sometimes cycle through Disney+/Netflix/Prime just looking on what I want to watch.
Not being judged for eating bagel bites, and the excitement on Christmas Eve. Sure, Christmas can still be exciting as an adult, but it's nothing like the anticipation of a child waiting for Christmas morning.
I miss arcades, I miss the mall in North Carolina that's long since closed down that had an amazing Toy's R Us across the street, a Spinnaker's at one end of the mall which made that entire wing smell like amazing fresh bread 24/7 and about 25% of the stores had wood panel walls you see in smoke shops most places. I went through North Carolina last year after being away 15+ years and it was how crap some of the malls had gotten and the fact South Square was shut down that devastated me the most.
The fact the fields I had hunted frogs in and the forests we had ran in where mostly subdivisions was nothing compared to finding out the old game shop that had gotten me into Magic the Gathering back in the day had ceased to exist five years before.
As the republic continues to crumble, nostalgia has never been more in.
This is exemplified by the theatre marquee at Edwards Cinema which features a list of movies that will have you checking the date to make sure you're in the right decade.
Devon Sawa—himself a 90s heartthrob—tweeted the image with the caption:
"Dear children of today: Like it or not, you're really 90s kids."
— (@)
The films are still a little different than their original counterparts: Pixar's animation has grown by leaps and bounds since the original Toy Story's release in 1995, Aladdin is a live-action remake, This decade'sChild's Play revolves around technology rather than voodoo, and Men in Black now features a woman as the lead.
Nevertheless, the marquee had people hella disoriented.
— (@)
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Some lamented that the nostalgia is actually a lack of originality.
— (@)
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If that doesn't overwhelm you, The Lion Kingwill be arriving to theatres next month.
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