9 Outdated Things Floridians Still Say Without Realizing It

Florida’s road signs have said “Beachline” along State Road 528 since July 2005.

Hardly anyone driving to the beach that summer changed a word.

Two decades later, “take the Bee Line” still comes out of older people’s mouths without a pause, along with a stack of other sentences that stopped being accurate years ago.

These are the outdated things Floridians who grew up in a different era still say.

1. “Put It in the Icebox”

Somebody says “put it in the icebox” over a plate of leftover pot roast, and nobody in the kitchen above the age of 60 misses a beat.

Grandkids have the right to be confused.

Merriam-Webster asked readers which childhood words had faded out of daily use, and “icebox” made the list.

These days, the “icebox” is a stainless steel refrigerator with a water dispenser, or the beer cooler humming in a Punta Gorda garage.

The word showed up in print in the late 1700s, more than a century before the electric refrigerator.

It held actual ice.

The first U.S. patent for an ice-making machine went to a doctor in Apalachicola, John Gorrie, in 1851.

Florida sent his statue to the U.S. Capitol for it.

2. “Take the Bee Line”

Ask for the Bee Line at a gas station in Cocoa, and a clerk old enough to remember it will give you directions plus an opinion about the toll.

A younger person has never seen that name on a sign.

State Road 528 opened in 1967 as the Bee Line Expressway, named for the way it bee-lined east toward Interstate 95.

The state renamed it the Martin B. Andersen Beachline Expressway, after the longtime publisher of the Orlando Sentinel.

The signs changed.

The drivers didn’t.

It’s still State Road 528 on every map, which is the one name almost nobody says out loud.

3. "Tape It for Me"

Say "tape it for me" about the Wednesday night game, and a grandkid has to stop and work out that you mean record it.

Blockbuster grew into the country's leading video rental chain under Wayne Huizenga, who had started out hauling garbage in Pompano Beach.

He didn't own a videocassette recorder himself when he bought in.

Funai, the last company on earth making videocassette recorders, stopped production in July 2016, blaming the trouble of finding parts.

The company sold 750,000 of them in its last full year, 2015, a sliver of its old numbers.

Boomers kept the word anyway.

Press record on a cable box that saves to a hard drive, and "tape it" still means "save that for me."

4. "Meet Me at Exit 25"

"Meet me at Exit 25" used to mean downtown Tampa.

Florida renumbered virtually every interstate exit to match the nearest mile marker, working in four stages that wrapped up in June 2005.

Downtown Tampa's exit off Interstate 275 stopped being Exit 25 and became Exit 44.

Nobody moved the ramp.

Numbers on the north-south interstates count up from the south end, so Exit 44 now sits at roughly mile 44.

Give the old number today, and you're pointing at a ramp miles from the exit you meant.

5. "Burdines"

Many Floridians still say they're running to Burdines, and they mean the Macy's at the mall.

Shoppers called Burdines "The Florida Store," and the Miami chain leaned into it with pink and blue paint and palm trees inside the store.

Federated Department Stores folded its regional chains into one name, and every Burdines became a Macy's in 2005.

That was twenty-one years ago.

Say you're running to Burdines at a Broward County mall, and anyone under forty has to ask which store you mean.

The name is off every building in the state, and it's still in the sentence.

6. "Joe Robbie Stadium"

Owners have renamed the stadium in Miami Gardens so many times that keeping up stopped being worth the effort.

The Dolphins' home opened in 1987 as Joe Robbie Stadium, honoring the owner who paid to build it.

It has worn eight more names since.

Pro Player, Land Shark, Sun Life, and Hard Rock have all taken a turn on the sign out front.

The first name is the one that stuck, so sponsors keep buying the letters while the tailgate crowd keeps saying what a sportswriter would have typed in 1989.

7. "Check the Phone Book"

Tell someone in Port Charlotte you need a plumber, and the phone book comes up before the phone does.

Florida regulators signed off on Verizon's request to stop distributing residential white pages in 2010, in the same stretch of weeks New York and Pennsylvania approved it.

Households had already moved on.

Between 2005 and 2008, the share of households leaning on a stand-alone white pages fell from 25% to 11%, according to a Gallup survey done for the directory publisher SuperMedia.

Directories kept landing on porches with the business and government listings inside.

The residential white pages turned into something you had to ask for.

8. "Cypress Gardens"

Say you're taking the kids to Cypress Gardens, and the kids have no idea you mean Legoland.

Cypress Gardens opened in 1936 and grew into Florida's first theme park, known for its water-ski shows and Southern belles in hoop dresses.

It closed in 2009 after years of losing visitors to the bigger parks near Orlando.

Merlin Entertainments bought the 150-acre property in 2010 for $22 million.

Legoland Florida opened on the same land on October 15, 2011.

Designers kept a large stretch of the old botanical gardens, banyan tree and all.

9. "Change for the Toll"

The question comes before the car leaves the driveway: Does anybody have change for the toll?

Florida's Turnpike finished converting its mainline to all-electronic tolling in 2023.

At those tolling points, the Turnpike doesn't take cash at all.

Cameras and sensors on a gantry read the plate, count the axles, and either pull the toll from a SunPass account or mail an invoice carrying a $2.50 administrative charge.

The coin baskets came out a long time ago.

Many drivers still keep a cup of quarters in the console out of muscle memory.

Nothing on the mainline has taken a quarter since 2023.

An Out-of-Stater Fumble

Point east at a launch from anywhere on the Space Coast and call it Cape Kennedy, and watch every Floridian in the parking lot stare at you.

President Lyndon B. Johnson announced that name six days after the Kennedy assassination in November 1963.

Floridians never took to it, given that the cape had carried the Canaveral name since the 1500s.

They pushed back, and the state restored the old name in October 1973.

It lasted ten years.

That same 1963 order renamed the launch center for Kennedy too, and that name never changed back.

So a rocket leaves Kennedy Space Center from a cape that stopped being Cape Kennedy before many of today's baby boomers moved down.

Words That Outlived Machines

Some phrases outlived the objects behind them, and Merriam-Webster's editors call those obsolete allusions.

"Hang up" was literal once, back when ending a call meant dropping the receiver into its cradle, the way you'd hang a coat on a hook.

"Dial" came from the rotary disc, which borrowed its own name from the face of a clock.

"Carbon copy" meant a sheet of carbon paper tucked under the page, and it lives on in the cc field of every email.

Nobody has loaded a sheet of carbon paper in decades.

Boomers get the blame.

Younger speakers say all three without a thought.