> I'm constantly surprised at how many cultural conventions are mysteries to modern generations.
Some of my law students are only dimly aware of Jerry Seinfeld. And when I play a bit of the organ solo from Procul Harum's 1967 Whiter Shade of Pale (to illustrate a copyright-royalties point), I'm lucky if one person recognizes it.
It’s often surprising what we discover younger people have no idea about. I had a twenty-something co-worker in 2018 who was a self-professed aficionado of submarine movies who had never seen Yellow Submarine (I can’t remember now if he’d heard of it at least or if even that was beyond his ken). My profile picture on my gmail account is a picture of Harpo Marx because I occasionally use Harpo as a nickname thanks to my first name having become undesirable a decade ago and I had a recruiter that I was working with ask me who the picture was, apparently having never seen a Marx brothers movie or even heard of them.
I still remember (years ago now) my coworker telling
me her family stayed in a motel on a trip and her children asking her how the phone worked. They had never seen a dial phone before and when asked, tried putting their finders in and out the holes to see if that would dial.
There was a somewhat lame Kevin Kline/Tom Selleck movie, called In and Out (1997), where one of the characters is this vacuous model (Shalom Harlow), who tries using a dial phone in that manner.
;-)