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Several things came to my mind at one time, so here's a confused notion which was sparked by BelM's hippie post. I was interested in an article in the last Smithsonian Magazine about old cars still running in Cuba. This reminded my wife, who reminded me, of what we enjoyed very much 2 years ago when we were on vacation in Mexico, in the state of Quintana Roo, which is in Yucatan. Everywhere you went you saw those old VW vans which were so beloved of certain alternative-lifestyle types in the '60s. Complete with slogans and bumper stickers and the original paint jobs, now, alas, very faded.
Those vans, and the old Buicks and Pontiacs etc. in Havana, are little preserved parts of the past. Preserved, as a dear malapropistic lady of my acquaintance says, like a fly in aspic.
Not counting artifical creations like Colonial Williamsburg, do any of you know of other flies in aspic? One that occurs to me is the buggies and electricity-free farms of the Amish in Lancaster County PA and elsewhere.
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you mean like my house with its double hung windows with sashweights? or the apartment in my childhood with a dumbwaiter?
several thread have got me thinking about words for technology that is obsolete. Station to station long distance calls, or telegrams or even turntable and vinyl records.
darning eggs, or sheets hems to middle, turned collars, or even a boarding house reach are becoming so archic to be obscure phrases. pehaps, someone can throw some ideas, words or phrases over the transom.
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Dear BYB: the word aspic is a bit interesting, being related to the color of an asp, a small venomous snake. Whoever chose the name to apply to something edible could easily have picked a term more palatable. And a fly in aspic suggests something even less appetizing. As a somewhat more appealing simile, why not a fly in amber? The only thing wrong with that is it would mean preservation for thousands if not millions of years. I see vehicles here in LA that are almost fifty years old.
It would not surprise me to find that they had been stolen when new for sale in South America and then used to transport an immigrant. Cars last better where there is no salt on the roads. I knew it would be egregiously bad manners to inquire how many times the odometer had reset, though I would very much like to know the answer. It is probable that those cars have had a dozen different owners, so that the present owner would not know the true total mileage. They will make a thesis subject for some urban archaeologist.
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While living in Mexico from 1975-1985, I used or owned many "flies in aspic". I washed clothes on a rock in the river. I also used a portable washboard and zinc tub, a cement washboard stand with a refillable tank attached to one side, or sometimes between two stationary washboards. This is a very common accessory to most back porches or patios. Then, I got a wringer washer. A Wahoo moment. Silence please. The automatic washer has my vote as the most important invention in this galaxy. I also had various ways of heating water for bathing, starting, of course, with the galvenized bucket on the woodstove, progressing to the wood-burning water heater, the electric shower head(woe be to them with a bad grounding!)and culminating in the ubiquitous gas water heater. The kerosene lantern is also an important purchase as the electricity situation in Mexico can be doubtful. When it departs, it is generally gone for days. One misguided "modern landlord" installed an electric stove in a house we rented. I ended up cooking by campfire a lot. I also lived at one time in a town in the "quinta fregada" meaning BFN in Spanish. We had no electricity or running water. Thank God my brother-in-law came with us and took charge of carrying water from the river. I could go on and on. Adventure being my middle name has a basis in fact 
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Oddly enough, Canada is a repository for old American one-cent pieces. People spent (and spend) them here and they are not taken out of circulation because the mint won't take 'em and not many collectors really want them because they are not Canadian.
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Dear consuelo: I'll bet a vacuum cleaner was a close second choice after the washer. I still remember the horrible job of beating rugs on a line out doors. And I still remember how wonderful it was to get a refrigerator, so that milk didn't get sour on the second day. The big galvanized icebox became a repository for woolens and furred coats. And how often do you see a man today with a handkerchief in his coat breast pocket? Or a handkerchief anywhere else? And neckties are a stupid anachronism.I've got a million of them.
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Rugs? What rugs? Nothin but smooth, almost glassy, cement or ceramic tiles on the floor. Cucarachas are bad enough without supplying them with something else to hide in. Nope, you gotta make them suckers skate!  Here in Michigan,though, I would hate not having a vacuum cleaner, but I would hate it even worse to have to wash my clothes in the Kalamazoo River in the dead of winter.
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Goodness Helen, I could think of thousands given some time. Just off the top of my head, first as regards clothes:
- Men's seersucker suits, worn with spectator shoes
- Men's Fedora hats, once ubiquitous, even at a ballgame, where 3-piece suits and ties were also worn
- Men tipping their Fedora to a lady, or standing in the street with the hat off to converse with a lady
- Men in white tie and tails at the opera
- Men getting married in a cutaway with striped trousers, ascot tie and double-breasted grey waistcoat, boiled white shirt with picadilly collar, grey top hat (I wore this at my wedding)
Medical:
- smallpox vaccinations which left you with a scar as big as a nickel on your arm
- cod liver oil
- 1 week in the hospital after having tonsils out, or post partum; 2 weeks after appendectomy; more than 2 weeks for other major surgery, such as gall bladder, amputation, etc.
Everyday tools, equipment, etc:
- eggbeaters
- stove lifters
- button hooks
- carpet beaters
- mechanical lawnmowers (i.e., no engine)
- the parlor
- the piano, usually upright, in the parlor
- canvas awnings and a swing on the porch
- straight razors and their strops
- double-edged safety razors and their blades
Enough for one go.
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Pooh-Bah
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>Men getting married in a cutaway with striped trousers, ascot tie and double-breasted grey waistcoat, boiled white shirt with picadilly collar, grey top hat (I wore this at my wedding) I suppose weddings are one of those times when people chose to step back in time (or not), so are invitably flies in aspic. If your post refers to the wearing of a morning suit (with tails), waistcoat, wing collared shirt and top hat, then you'd probably consider a lot of present day English and Welsh weddings to be flies in aspic, following much the same style (evening wear doesn't tend to be worn because weddings tend to be in the daytime in a church or registery office, rarely in a private house). http://www.weddingguide.co.uk/grooms/forthegroomwear.aspYou may also consider the fact that the wedding cake is usually a fruit cake to be another fly in aspic! Maybe old fashioned weddings remain popular because the weather, rarely makes the wearing of thick heavy morning suits too uncomfortable. In Scottish formal weddings the men wear kilts - my neigbour set off in a classic car for his daughter's wedding a few days ago, he easily upstaged the women members of his party. "Four Weddings and a Funeral" is the definitive formal wedding catalogue. By the way I wonder why I never see the word "tuxedo" used here for a black jacket (it may be used for a formal white jacket), it tends to be described as a "dinner jacket" or "dress suit" and the invitation to a formal event would specify "black tie". Similarly, the term "maid of honour" is out of my parent's generation, I've never heard it mentioned here amongst any of my agegroup, although it seems to be still used in the USA. The other thing that I have never come across here, is wedding (or baby for that matter) "showers" - they sound wet and uncomfortable to me. I wonder how far back they date? Mind you, the web is full of wedding suppliers. I found some great ideas for more up-to-date weddings for anyone getting married later this month, you still have time!  : http://www.wednet.com/questions/engage13.asp
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Good heavens, Jo--look what I found, going link to link in your site. I read the Halloween Wedding story, and got curious about the author, Kathryn A. Laity. She's a prof. of medieval studies at the U. of Connecticut, and look what she did her dissertation on:
Local Heroes: The Sociolinguistic Context for the Development of Vernacular Saints' Lives in Old Irish, Old Norse and Old English.
This dissertation investigates the particular case of the vernacular lives of three native saints, Brigit, Óláf and Guþlac, within the context of the heroic and literary traditions of Ireland, Scandinavia and England during the Middle Ages. It scrutinizes where these portrayals lie on a continuum between the competing traditions that affect their formulation: the widely-disseminated, influential Latin vitae and the popular epics of the vernacular literary heroes and mythical figures. It focuses on these particular saints' lives because they embody the different tensions—and the creative resolutions—between these competing traditions in very different ways: Brigit as the reformulation of a pagan deity; Óláf as the land-hungry Viking king; and Guþlac as the quintessential Anglo-Saxon warrior.
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Pooh-Bah
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>and got curious about the author ...
Sad, Jackie, sad. Funny how the internet works, you think that a computer is going to save you time and maybe even make you some money, then ... some hours later ... you discover that you are now much beter informed about Brigit, Óláf and Guþlac but you still haven't made the beds/completed urgent assignment/fed the cat. So much useless information, so little time!
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Dear Jackie: I searched for your "GuÞlac" using "th" instead of the "Þ", and found a whole long list of lovely sites about him and his sister Pega. I am indeed grateful to you for giving me a clue that will yield many pleasant hours of browsing.Just in case anyone else is interested, here is the URL: http://www.umilta.net/pega.htmlP.S. Interestingly, the manuscripts spell his name with "th" not with a "Þ".
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You are correct, Jo, that the getup I described for weddings is properly called "morning dress", as "evening dress" is the narrower swallow-tail coat, black, with black trousers (satin stripes on the side of the legs, no cuffs), wing collar and white bow tie and single-breasted white waistcoat (black tie and waistcoat is a permissable, but seldom seen, alternative). You don't hear the term "tuxedo" that much in more proper circles because it is considered déclassé; the correct term is "dinner jacket" and an invitation requesting that one wear it does, indeed, say "black tie". No real gentlemen would ever wear one in any color other than black, midnight blue being a possible exception, and the white version only in Florida or other tropical clime. BTW, the French word for dinner jacket is "smoking" and that is the notation on an invitation, sometimes leading the inexperienced to expect a smoker, which is a horse of another color (blue).
Weddings in the late afternoon or in the evening are popular here; my son's wedding last year was in the garden of a 200 year old inn at 6:00 p.m.; the gentlemen wore dinner jackets. We attended a very elegant wedding a few years ago at the great Basilica in downtown Baltimore which was at 7:00 p.m.; men wore the soup and fish, as it's called here -- full evening dress (white tie).
Not to introduce a food topic, I find it interesting that English wedding cakes are fruit cakes. Fruit cake is an object of jokes here. American wedding cakes are usually a plain white cake, sometimes yellow, with white buttercream icing with lavish decorations, although I have been to weddings with a chocolate cake (white icing) when the principals were chocoholics.
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fed the cat
AUGH--she was supposed to go to the vet today! No time, now. You're right, I am sad (Brit. def.). I'll see you-all later.
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Pooh-Bah
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>I find it interesting that English wedding cakes are fruit cakes. The problem is that the traditonal British Wedding Cake is in three layers with columns holding up the layers, http://www.weddingguide.co.uk as anything other than a fruit cake isn't strong enough. They generally are made with the really firm Royal icing that breaks your teeth if you try to bite into it. The top layer is meant to have the icing removed and kept, so that it can be re-iced for the Christening (as many Christenings take place before the weddings these days it is dying out). All celebration cakes, special birthdays, christenings, Christmas, especially amongst the older generation are generally fruit cakes. We have the expression "nutty as a fruit cake" but it doesn't seem to be as big a joke as in the USA. I was surprised that traditonal American wedding cakes are sponge cakes but I see that they generally are piled on top of each other without columns, so they don't need to be so strong http://www.weddingbasics.com/images/cakes/cake_2.jpg. Funny, the more you look at wedding sites, the more attractive eloping to Gretna Green becomes.
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Pooh-Bah
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>I am sad (Brit. def.)
It is probably a YART but does "sad" only work in that way in the UK?
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Balti dishes are used to making Balti, a kind of indian inspired (if not, orginated) fast food. Balti restaurants in the UK originated in Birmingham and spread rapidly. The basic idea is that a base mix (cooking mix) is made up of roasted and combined spices, then at the final stages a masala (sprinkling mix) is added but not cooked into the ingredients. The best kind of dishes are like small woks, especially well-worn ones, rather than the shiny things (probably kept at the back of the cupboard with the fondue set) advertised on the wedding site as more of a fashion item than a cooking item. Here is an extract from http://www.owlsprings.com/the_balti_page.html which (for wordies, rather than foodies) gives a flavour of the controversy attached to the origins of the name. What's a Balti?
It has nothing to do with Baltimore or Baltinglass, but a great deal to do with Birmingham....
The Balti is an Indian dish representative of a style of cooking which some say is native to Baltistan. It's a kind of curry, its ingredients usually assembled and cooked quickly in a manner reminiscent of a stir-fry.
The heart of this style of cooking is a cast-iron pot, originally also called the balti. The balti evolved into a half-hemispherical pot as likely to be made of steel as iron, and usually called the karahi or karai. A Balti is usually both cooked in the karahi, and served at the table in it. Typically served with Balti is naan bread, a thinnish leavened bread (somewhat like pita bread) torn up and used as an eating implement, to scoop up the Balti and get at the sauce. This utensil-less approach turns Balti into one of the "sport" foods, like ribs: you get it, or it gets you, and sometimes both.
Balti in Europe started attracting notice during the last decade in Birmingham in England -- particularly in the city's Sparkhill and Sparkbrook areas, home of some of the oldest and best Balti houses, and now increasingly known as "the Balti Belt." Word of the wonderfulness of Balti began to spread through the rest of the UK and elsewhere, with the result that Balti is rapidly turning into one of the "hot" things in the food world (to the amusement of those of us who've liked it for years).
...Just a note here about the origins of the name "Balti": various correspondents have written to say that Balti doesn't have anything to do with Baltistan, which they both describe as an area where most people are vegetarian, and not likely to have evolved a cuisine with so much meat in it. Saad As-Jandal adds, "It seems like the Pakistani community in Birmingham and elsewhere have attatched a romantic notion that these so called Balti dishes originate from Baltistan, whereas from my knowledge it is more commonly found in Peshawar North West Pakistan, where it is known as 'Karhai'. -- So please spread the word and let it be known."
Does Balti mean 'bucket'?
Well, yes, it does. At least it seems to in Hindi: how many other Subcontinental languages share the etymology, we're not sure.
Some controversy over the word has bubbled up in the last few years. There are those (among them some fairly influential restaurant owners) who claim that in their vocabulary, "balti" is "a dirty word". Rumours abound that the dish, or cooking style, was invented as a way to put drunken British "lager louts" in their place by "feeding them out of a bucket".
We decline to get involved in speculation about this, fascinating as etymology can be. The truth about Balti, in the UK at least, is that that is the name which most fans of the cuisine most readily recognize it, at the moment. Other restaurants may choose to move away from it: that's their choice. Meanwhile, where you don't see the term "balti", try looking for the words "karai" or "karahi", other names for the basic utensil. To a certain degree, the utensil determines the cooking style, as a corollary of the "form follows function" rule. And the whole point, after all, is to enjoy the food...
Incidentally, over the last couple of years -- in the face of the continuing popularity of the cooking style, perhaps? -- some of the personalities who had most vehemently insisted that Balti either "didn't exist" or was "not really Indian food at all" have done some surprising about-faces. The name of one prominent author of numerous Indian cookbooks, who not only refused to acknowledge Balti, but didn't even believe in curry, now appears on the labels of a major Indian food manufacturer's jars of Balti "mix". Life is strange...
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Pooh-Bah
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>Oh, one other thing. I noticed that the espresso maker had been spelled "Expresso maker." Is the 'x' common in British spelling of espresso? Just curious. Yes, I've definitely seen both, on searching you can even find both on the same page: http://www.nespressostore.com/expresso-maker-d.html. It reminds me of the zucchini debate, I suspect that it was anglicised in some places to begin with to be “expresso” then the more correct “espresso” took over, in some cases it is is probably a spelling error. I looked up “Costa Coffee” which is a bit like Starbucks and they use “espresso”. Manufacturers of some machines, on the other hand, seem to call them “Expresso machines”. Aha: I found this wonderful coffee site: http://www.tardis.ed.ac.uk/~adb/coffee/coffee.html 3. How do you spell Espresso?
By far, the most common spelling used throughout the world today is "espresso". This is a shortened form of the original Italian name for the drink "caffe espresso" (accent marks omitted). This spelling is considered to be the correct spelling by the vast majority of of coffee consumers, vendors, retailers, and producers.
Some English language dictionaries also list "expresso" as a variant spelling. However, this does not mean the spelling is 'equally valid'. (see the post by Jesse Sheidlower included below)
It was pointed out during the great "espresso vs. expresso" debate (spring 94) that the Italian alphabet does not even contain the letter "X", which is incorrect.
Further, it was discovered that at least three dictionaries contained incorrect definitions of the word "espresso". The American Heritage Dictionary gave the following definition:
"A strong coffee brewed by forcing steam under pressure through darkly roasted, powdered coffee beans." The Oxford English Dictionary said:
"Coffee brewed by forcing steam through powdered coffee beans" The Webster New World Dictionary gives: "coffee prepared in a special machine from finely ground coffee beans, through which steam under high pressure is forced." All three of these are wrong. In fact, espresso is a strong coffee brewed by quickly forcing hot water through darkly roasted, finely ground coffee beans.
(Some espresso makers do use steam, but only to force the hot water through the ground coffee. The steam NEVER touches the coffee. Many espresso makers use no steam at all. Instead, they use either a pump or a piston to quickly force hot water through the ground coffee.)
Once these errors and the origins of the word "espresso" had been pointed out, the argument "but expresso is in the dictionary" quickly began to crumble. The final death blow to this position came in a post by dictionary editor Jesse Sheidlower. This post is reproduced in its entirety below:
From: Jesse Sheidlower
I find this thread fascinating. I regret that it demonstrates an unfamiliarity with dictionaries and how to use them, but no matter. I believe that I am the only dictionary editor to participate in this discussion, so let me waste a bit more bandwidth addressing some of the points made so far, and introducing a few others:
o The OED, Second Edition, does include _espresso_ and _expresso_, the latter being a variant of the former. It correctly derives it from Italian _caffe espresso_.
[Accents left off here.] Whoever claimed it derives the term from a would-be Italian _caffe expresso_ was in error.
o There _is_ an "x" in Latin and Italian.
o There are four major American dictionaries (published by Merriam Webster, Webster's New World, Random House, and American Heritage). The most recent edition of each gives _espresso_ as the main form, and_expresso_ as a variant only. The fact that _expresso_ is listed in the dictionary does not mean that it is equally common: the front matter for each dictionary explains this. The person who claimed that three dictionaries including OED give _expresso_ as "equally valid" was in error.
o Dictionaries, in general, do not dictate usage: they reflect the usage that exists in the language. If a dictionary says that _espresso_ is the main spelling, it means that in the experience of its editors (based on an examination of the language), _espresso_ is notably more common. It does not mean that the editors have a vendetta against _expresso_.
o To the linguist who rejects the authority of dictionaries: I agree that language is constantly changing; I'm sure that every dictionary editor in the country does as well.
Dictionaries are outdated before they go to press. But I think they remain accurate to a large extent. Also, if you are going to disagree with the conclusions of a dictionary, you should be prepared to back yourself up.
I can defend, with extensive written evidence, our decision to give _espresso_ as the preferred form.
o The spelling _espresso_ is the form used by the copy desks of the _New York Times,_ _Gourmet,_ _Bon Appetit,_ The _Wine Spectator,_ the _Wall St. Journal,_ the _L.A. Times,_ _Time,_ _Newsweek,_ and to my knowledge every other major or minor newspaper or magazine, general or food-related, in the English-speaking world. The fact that a handwritten menu on an Italian restaurant door spells it "expresso" is trivial by comparison.
o In sum: though both _espresso_ and _expresso_ are found, the former is by far the more common. It is also to be favored on immediate etymological evidence, since the Italian word from which it is directly borrowed is spelled _espresso_. The form _espresso_ is clearly preferred by all mainstream sources.
Jesse T Sheidlower. Editor.
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Oh, wail! You have made me desperately miss my beloved shanks. Where are you, darlin'?
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