I am mid-40s. My daughter is 11. I take her to school, among other driving things, and usually play NPR. Whenever she needs to refer to what she’s hearing – usually to ask if I’ll turn it off so she can pull up some godawful thing where a random Youtuber squawks discordant lyrics to a Pokémon video game score – she calls it a podcast. I’ve stopped correcting her, particularly since most of the “shows” release as podcasts by the next day anyway.
“We used to have to watch commercials”
“We used to have to wait til the next week to watch the next episode”
“We used to have to wait til we got home to call people”
“We used to wonder out loud about stuff and have to go to the fucking library to find an answer”
My son’s face screws up for all of these
Or look in the multi-volume encyclopedia set. I still remember the smell of the glossy pages that were printed in color. I felt like royalty!
Then we got Microsoft Encarta on a CD and it was so high-tech.
One of the things my friends and I would do in the middle of our lengthy discussions about whatever was to call the library and ask them to settle some dispute or other. They were always sincerely thrilled to help, often to the point of needing to go do research and then call us back.