Anachronism

n.    ( -n k r -n z m)

1. An artifact that belongs to another time*.

Back when I used to wear ties to work (is anyone still wondering why I wanted to move here), one of my favorites was a deep blue silk tie with a bright yellow object repeated as a pattern throughout.  The tie itself wasn't anything special to look at... but the reactions it inspired were priceless.

The yellow objects on the tie looked like this:

Now those of you older than thirty five or forty are nodding your heads and saying, "I know what that is!"  The rest of you are pretty much lost. 

Right so far?

I had purchased the tie at a shop in Grand Central Station because I liked the colors.  But when I got it home my wife gave me a new reason to love it.  She took one look at my new piece of neck-wear and asked, "Why did you buy a tie with the symbol for radioactivity on it?"

Right then and there it occurred to me that she and I were from opposite sides of a generational divide that could be defined by whether or not one could identify the inspiration for this silly tie. 

For the sake of accuracy, once I told her what it was, Zahava insisted that she recognized it all along... but that is something of which I'm still a bit, um, skeptical.

From that point on, whenever I wore the tie I would go out of my way to ask people if they could identity the object depicted on my tie.  Almost without exception people who were under 35 gave answers like 'a swastika', 'a radiation symbol' or my all-time favorite; 'the insignia that Star Fleet officers wore on Star Trek'.

Of course, those of us born before or during the Kennedy administration recognize this yellow object is the little plastic thing-a-ma-jig one used in order to play a 45rpm records on a home phonograph.  If you had a lot of 45s you likely had a big plastic thing a bit thicker than an iPod Mini that fit over the thin metal spindle at the center of the phonograph.  This allowed you to stack up a bunch of 45s and have them drop/play one after the other.  But nearly every household had at least a handful of these , um 'things'.

In fact, unless I'm mistaken, I think I once had a little gun that would shoot these things across a room!  I call them things because I still don't know if they ever had an official name.  I've heard them called 'spiders' and '45 adapters'... but if they had an official name it never caught on.

For those of you who have no meaningful memories before the Carter administration, the reason 45rpm records (also sometimes called 'singles') had a large hole in the center instead of a little one the size of a phonograph's spindle is that they were designed to fit on the big changer arm inside a juke box.

OK...  just stop it!  Your blank stares are just freaking me out!!!

Suffice it to say that this 'thing' is now a small badge of honor that we 'boomers' can wear with pride on our ties... or on our lapels... to remind us that many of the ubiquitous objects we once took for granted are fast becoming anachronisms. 

* one of several definitions for the word 'anachronism' found at WordNet ® 2.0, © 2003 Princeton University