How Not to Act Old: 185 Ways to Pass for Cool, Sound, Wicked, or at Least Not Totally Lame

How Not to Act Old: 185 Ways to Pass for Cool, Sound, Wicked, or at Least Not Totally Lame
Pamela Redmond Satran

Still want to be cool but are afraid you no longer know how? Be not afraid – old is the new young!You dye your hair, you happily order the weekly shop online, you're planning a trip to South America and even know who won Big Brother this year. But last week you also told your kids that G4 are 'sick' and were promptly silenced by looks of utter scorn.Stay away from language that has no right to come out of lips that are more than 45 years old…make that 35…no, make that 14. No-one over the age of 16 uses 'sick' to describe anything, you don't 'hook-up' if you're not a teenager and you know you're over 40 if you have ever told another adult to carry an umbrella 'because the weather looks iffy'. If you think you're too old to act young or too past it to join Facebook, think again. This book is the essential guide to how not to act old - and how not to embarrass yourself whilst doing it!With 150 different 'ways' how not to act old, this book covers everything you need to know about being young and how to recognise your limits when trying out your new, younger, attitude to life. Covering many areas including slang speech, relationships, parenting, fashion and technology and written with wit, style and humour, this book is sure to be a source of both amusement and comfort to people of a certain age everywhere.Remember - old is just Young 2.0!

Copyright

HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)

Published in 2010 by Collins

First published in the USA by HarperCollins,

195 Broadway, New York in 2009

Text © Pamela Redmond Satran 2009

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Pamela Redmond Satran asserts her moral right to be identified as the author of this work

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks

HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication

Source ISBN: 9780007306138

Ebook Edition © APRIL 2017 ISBN: 9780007438204

Version: 2017-04-27

Dedication

For my father

Joe Redmond

for ever ageless

Contents

Introduction

OK, so you go to the gym, but do you Tweet? You don’t wear orthopaedic shoes, but can you grind? You own a mobile phone, but do you make calls with your index finger and leave voice mails?

If so, you may be acting older – a lot older – than you think you are.

I know, I know, you believed it would never happen to you. You thought you’d be cool for ever. And then, seemingly overnight, the evil young changed all the rules and you’re left feeling … well, definitely something other than awesome.

Don’t worry. The point here isn’t to act like a twenty-six-year-old: God forbid. It’s just to learn how not to act like somebody a twenty-six-year-old might snicker at. Or, failing that, at least to know when you’re doing or saying something that might be construed as a mite over the hill – even if you don’t want to change it.

Fans of hownottoactold.com (http://hownottoactold.com) will find this book features two-thirds all-new material, information that’s never appeared on the website. And fans of the book should check in regularly at the site to find up-to-the-minute bulletins on how to keep not acting ancient.

We may be older than them. And tireder, saggier, crankier and more overwhelmed. We might be loath to wax our nether regions or adopt the thong – but at least when we act old, we’ll know we’re doing it.

#1 Stop Using E-mail

Leave it to the evil young to get all of us old people addicted to e-mail, and then to abandon the form in favour of texting and Facebook. Like bikini waxing (more on that later), e-mail is proving to be one of the Great Age Divides. Old people can’t figure out why anyone would text, IM, or Facebook (wait: is that a verb?) instead of e-mail; how can you be articulate while typing with your thumbs? Why would you want everything you say to be public?

And young people hate e-mailing because it’s … old.

Well, I don’t care if e-mail is old; I can’t stop using it. That’s right, I’m addicted to e-mail, just as I am to dark chocolate after lunch and nitrous oxide at the dentist. I joined LinkedIn and Facebook and all those other services, and now I don’t know what to do with them – or on them – or however you say it. So if you want to get in touch with me, send me an e-mail.

Just make sure it doesn’t look like this one:

HOW NOT TO E-MAIL OLD: 10 MUSTS TO AVOID

12 July, 2009

Dear Pam,

Thank you for inviting me to your party.

Unfortunately,

I will not be able to attend as I’ll be having my false teeth fitted that day. My teeth had been bothering me for quite some time.

You know how it is when your gums start receding and then you crack a tooth or two chomping away on sweets. Next thing you know you need a root canal, and then a crown, and then it’s just a house of cards in there.

That’s what happened to me, and so I found this dentist, Dr Marino, who said he’d pull them all out for just £4,000, which sounded like a bargain to me, so I told him …

So write back and tell me what’s going on with you.

Your friend,

Don

www.donjenson.com (http://www.donjenson.com)

#2 Don’t Say ‘Awesome’, ‘Dude’, or ‘Phat’

Slang is basically a shorthand way to let other people know how old you are. The problem is it doesn’t work as simply and directly as you might think.

Using too-young slang, for instance, can very easily backfire and make you seem older, not younger, than you are. It’s akin to wearing a yellow miniskirt or driving a Zipcar; you’re trying too hard to be comfortable with something that was obviously minted by and for a generation that came way after yours.