11.25.2008

When is "old fashioned"?

I just took a swig of some "gourmet soda" manufactured by a drugstore chain in the US. It's so gourmet, it has such fancy ingredients as artificial flavor, sodium benzoate, carmel color, and citric acid. Yeah, it's "gourmet" all right.

But that's not what I noticed: it has the word "old fashioned" to describe what kind of root beer it is.

So now I'm wondering, what is "old fashioned"? It's 2008, so is that like 100 years ago, or 50, or more? And have they only been using such a phrase in the 20th and 21st centuries? I wonder if they used "old fashioned" in the 18th century, or earlier in England (since they've been around a lot longer than the US).

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