Last week I finished revising and updating a book on manners for kids that was published some years back by a company that since went out of business when the publisher/owner retired.

There was a section in the book on telephone etiquette that presumed the family had a landline. Does anyone besides my friend Chuckie, who doesn’t even own a computer, still have a landline? And even if they do, wouldn’t the kids, if they had to relinquish the phone to another family member, just use their cells? I left the section on phone etiquette in the book, but I wonder how many readers will be able to relate to kids hogging a family phone and similar situations?

So many times, books—both fiction and nonfiction—date themselves, often with the most innocuous words or scenes. A book written in the seventies, for example, would call a flight attendant a “stewardess.” Perfectly legitimate when the book was written. But someone reading it now would be brought up short. If the book was nonfiction, a reader might even wonder if any of the information or advice in it was just as outdated. Another exammple—and one I had to excise from the manners book—involves the cost of a Long Distance call. Almost everyone has free Long Distance these days. Or if it’s not literally free, it’s built into the base rate of your service as a flat rate, regardless of how many calls you make to distant places in the U.S. or how long you talk for. Another example of a dated reference would be referring to Russia as the “Soviet Union” or the “USSR.”

These dated references are not the anachronisms that putting a touch-tone phone in a novel set in 1930 is, but they are just as jarring.

Of course, when we writers set a book back in 1970 or 1940, whether it’s fiction or nonfiction, we SHOULD have our characters say “stewardess” and not “flight attendant.” But when a book was set in the time it was written and is meant to be current, but the book is still around 20 or 40 years later, such references, or others such as mentions of clothing or gadgets that were popular then but are not around now can be jarring.

But it can make for some unexpected enjoyment when you read if you specifically look for dated references and catch them one by one, thinking, “My, how the world has changed!” with each one you catch. Books can really be a mirror of their time.