9 phrases Gen X used in the 90s that Gen Z would never understand without a translation

I was helping my nephew with a school project last week when he asked me what "rewinding" meant. Not rewinding a video, just the word itself. He'd never encountered it outside of digital contexts. That moment hit me harder than it should have.

Growing up in suburban Sacramento in the 90s, my entire vocabulary was shaped by objects and experiences that have since vanished. Phrases that felt permanent, woven into the fabric of how we talked, are now linguistic fossils. And honestly? Most of Gen Z has zero reference point for them.

This isn't about nostalgia for its own sake. It's about how rapidly our shared language evolves when the physical world changes. Within a single generation, entire ways of describing everyday life became incomprehensible.

Here are nine phrases from the 90s that need subtitles for anyone born after 2000.

1) "Hang up the phone"

This one seems obvious until you realize that younger people have never physically hung anything up to end a call.

The phrase comes from landlines, where you literally placed a handset onto a cradle or hook. There was a satisfying physical action, a definitive click that meant the conversation was over. You could hang up on someone with authority.

Now? You tap a red circle on a screen. Same function, completely different experience.

But we still say "hang up" even though nothing hangs anywhere. The phrase persists while the physical reality disappeared two decades ago. It's a ghost phrase, haunting our language long after its original meaning died.

When I explained this to my nephew, he looked at me like I was describing ancient hieroglyphics. Which, in a way, I was.

2) "Roll down the window"

Car windows used to have manual cranks. You'd grab a small handle inside the door and physically roll it in circles to lower the glass. It required actual effort, especially if the mechanism was old or sticky.

My first car in college had manual windows, and my arm would get tired on hot days when I wanted airflow. There was something visceral about it though, that direct mechanical connection between your action and the result.

Gen Z just presses a button. No rolling involved whatsoever.

Yet we all still say "roll down the window" because language changes slower than technology. The metaphor outlived the mechanism by decades. It's one of those phrases that makes perfect sense to us but requires a full explanation for anyone who never touched a window crank.

3) "Rewind the tape"

Before streaming, before DVDs, before even digital anything, we had VHS tapes. And if you wanted to watch something again, you had to physically rewind it, watching the counter spin backward as the magnetic tape wound back onto the original spool.

There were even dedicated rewinding machines because doing it in your VCR wore it out faster. "Be kind, rewind" was printed on every rental tape from Blockbuster.

Now when I tell someone to "rewind that part," I'm using a verb that references technology they've never encountered. The concept of tape spools, of physical media that had to be manually reset, is completely foreign.

My partner, who's not much younger than me, still uses this phrase constantly. But to Gen Z? It's meaningless. They scrub backward on a timeline. They don't rewind anything.

4) "You sound like a broken record"

Records could skip. If vinyl got scratched or the needle stuck, the same few seconds of audio would repeat endlessly until someone lifted the arm and moved it forward.

So when someone kept repeating themselves, we'd say they sounded like a broken record. It was the perfect metaphor because everyone had experienced that annoying loop of music or speech playing over and over.

But most of Gen Z has never played a vinyl record, broken or otherwise. Sure, vinyl has made a comeback among collectors and audiophiles, but it's niche. The average young person has no tactile memory of a needle stuck in a groove.

The phrase persists in some contexts, but it's lost its punch. Without the shared reference point, it's just an odd comparison involving outdated technology.

5) "Dial a number"

Rotary phones had actual dials. You'd stick your finger in a hole, rotate the dial clockwise to the finger stop, then release it and wait for it to spin back. Each number required this separate physical action.

Making a phone call took time and intention. You couldn't quickly tap out digits. You had to commit to each number, waiting for the dial to return before moving to the next one.

I've mentioned this before, but my grandmother still says "dial" even though she's been using a smartphone for years. It's muscle memory in language form.

Gen Z doesn't dial anything. They tap, they swipe, they use contact lists. The word "dial" is completely divorced from their experience of making calls. Yet somehow it lingers in our collective vocabulary, this artifact from when telecommunications required physical rotation.

6) "Burning a CD"

In the late 90s and early 2000s, if you wanted to share music or create a custom playlist, you burned a CD. The term came from the laser literally burning pits into the disc's surface to encode data.

It felt almost magical at the time, this ability to create your own albums. I spent hours in my Venice Beach apartment curating perfect mixes, adjusting the order, making sure the transitions flowed.

But now? Music lives in the cloud. Playlists are digital. The entire concept of physically burning data onto a disc seems absurdly cumbersome.

When I reference burning a CD in conversation, younger people look confused. They understand burning as destruction by fire, not as a method of data storage. The metaphor doesn't translate without explanation.

7) "Drop the needle"

Another vinyl reference, but this one's more specific. When you wanted to play a record, you carefully lifted the tonearm and dropped the needle into the groove at the start of a song or album.

It required a delicate touch. Drop it too hard and you could scratch the record. Miss the groove and you'd hear that awful scraping sound. There was a skill to it, a physicality that made playing music feel like an active participation.

"Drop the needle" became slang for starting something, for getting into the substance of a matter. But without the experience of actually handling a turntable, the phrase is just confusing.

I still have my collection of vinyl from my music blogging days in the 2000s, but they're more nostalgic objects than my primary way of listening to music. For Gen Z, the needle is an abstraction.

8) "Cc someone on an email"

This one still gets used in professional contexts, but its origins are completely obscure to younger people. "Cc" stands for "carbon copy," which refers to carbon paper used with typewriters.

When you typed something, you'd place carbon paper between two sheets, and the pressure from the typewriter keys would create a duplicate copy on the second sheet. This is how you made copies before photocopiers and digital documents.

So when email was invented, they borrowed this terminology. You'd "carbon copy" someone by including them on a message.

But no one under 30 has ever used carbon paper or seen a typewriter in regular use. The phrase is a fossil, a linguistic holdover that's maintained its function while losing its meaning.

9) "Clockwise and counterclockwise"

Okay, this one's still used, but think about it: how many Gen Z people regularly look at analog clocks? They grew up with digital everything.

The concept of "clockwise" assumes you understand how clock hands move in a circular pattern. But if you've spent your entire life reading time as numbers on a screen, that rotational reference point is weaker.

I'm not saying they can't understand it, but it's not the automatic, embodied knowledge it was for previous generations. We learned left from right partly by watching clock hands move. That physical understanding of circular direction was built into how we experienced time itself.

Now time is just numbers changing. The clockface is decorative at best, irrelevant at worst.

The bottom line

Language is always changing, but technology accelerates that change in weird ways. These phrases feel normal to me because I lived the physical experiences they describe. But to someone who never touched a rotary phone or rewound a VHS tape, they're archaeological artifacts.

What strikes me most isn't just that these phrases are fading. It's how quickly they became incomprehensible. One generation. That's all it took.

Makes you wonder what phrases we use today will sound completely alien in another twenty years. Probably "swipe right" or "charge your phone" or something we can't even predict yet.

The world keeps moving. Language tries to keep up. And those of us in the middle become accidental translators between eras we've lived through and futures we're still figuring out.