We’ve all heard the excuse, be it from parents or angry commenters on BuzzFeed — “it was the ‘80’s.” What does this mean? I’ve always wondered, considering its seeming endless utility — you can use it to excuse casual drug use, weird music tastes, racism, UFO sightings, cults, you name it, the ‘80s had it. I decided to do some research. I started by interviewing a few people who were actually alive then, believe it or not.
My first interviewee’s first and only statement was “in the ‘80s, people thought music videos were actually important.” My second interviewee’s only answer to “Hey Mom, what were the Eighty’s like?” was “Expensive.” Interesting. The more I learned about this era of long past, the more strange and unnatural it seemed!
According to Wikipedia, which is apparently about 80% accurate (according to Wikipedia, so maybe I should put some error bars on that), “The 1980s (pronounced "nineteen-eighties", shortened to "the '80s") is a decade of the Gregorian calendar.” After reading a few more paragraphs about “Laissez-faire capitalism”, which I can neither pronounce nor understand, and some stuff about the Cold War, I got bored and concluded that no one knows what the ‘80s were like.
I was forced to resort to my tool of last resort — my God-given abilities of inductive logic. Please don’t tell me I used that phrase wrong because I know, and I don’t intend to fix it. My gut tells me the ‘80s had really good sequin pants. Perhaps this is even where the oft used term “fancy pants” comes from. Or wait. Was shiny junk the ‘70s? I don’t pretend to know. Besides, carbon dating is imprecise at best. Archeologists can only do so much. So, with these so-called fancy pants, what did denizens of the age do all day? As in most parts of history, the vast majority were farmers, while there were a few feudal lords. I assume women were not invented yet, as I have never read about the role of women in the ‘80s. So, presumably it was a time of much social turmoil. Perhaps because of the fancy pants? Oh well. There is no way we can know these things.
My first interviewee’s first and only statement was “in the ‘80s, people thought music videos were actually important.” My second interviewee’s only answer to “Hey Mom, what were the Eighty’s like?” was “Expensive.” Interesting. The more I learned about this era of long past, the more strange and unnatural it seemed!
According to Wikipedia, which is apparently about 80% accurate (according to Wikipedia, so maybe I should put some error bars on that), “The 1980s (pronounced "nineteen-eighties", shortened to "the '80s") is a decade of the Gregorian calendar.” After reading a few more paragraphs about “Laissez-faire capitalism”, which I can neither pronounce nor understand, and some stuff about the Cold War, I got bored and concluded that no one knows what the ‘80s were like.
I was forced to resort to my tool of last resort — my God-given abilities of inductive logic. Please don’t tell me I used that phrase wrong because I know, and I don’t intend to fix it. My gut tells me the ‘80s had really good sequin pants. Perhaps this is even where the oft used term “fancy pants” comes from. Or wait. Was shiny junk the ‘70s? I don’t pretend to know. Besides, carbon dating is imprecise at best. Archeologists can only do so much. So, with these so-called fancy pants, what did denizens of the age do all day? As in most parts of history, the vast majority were farmers, while there were a few feudal lords. I assume women were not invented yet, as I have never read about the role of women in the ‘80s. So, presumably it was a time of much social turmoil. Perhaps because of the fancy pants? Oh well. There is no way we can know these things.