Some sayings should come with a warning label: May cause teenagers to sigh dramatically and leave the room.

North Carolina boomers have an arsenal of them, sharpened across decades.

No eye roll has ever stopped a single one from being said again.

Here’s the lineup, from the dinner-table staples to the car-ride classics.

Back in My Day

The granddaddy of them all. Three words in, and every grandkid knows a history lecture is coming.

Back in my day, gas cost a quarter.

Back in my day, we played outside until the streetlights came on.

Back in my day, a phone hung on the wall and the whole family shared it.

The grandkids hear it as a rerun. The grandparents mean it as a gift, a postcard from a world the kids will never visit.

Uphill Both Ways

No childhood commute in history was as grueling as a boomer’s walk to school.

Five miles, uphill in both directions.

The geography doesn’t hold up, and the grandkids have pointed this out roughly 600 times. Hills only go up one way.

Doesn’t matter.

The story grows a new hardship every Thanksgiving. Last year, there were wolves.

The route was always beside the point.

The saying is shorthand for “We had it harder, and we’re a little proud of that.”

Money Doesn’t Grow on Trees

Deployed whenever a grandkid asks for anything with a price tag, this one has been in continuous service since the Eisenhower administration.

The kids find it maddening because, technically, they never claimed it did.

They just wanted Robux.

But the saying outlasts the eye rolls because it carries a whole economics course in six words.

Somebody worked for this. Money runs out. Want costs something.

Boomers grew up with parents who survived the Depression, and the lesson got passed down.

Grandkids raised on “let’s discuss our feelings” find this one borderline unconstitutional.

They want reasons, negotiations, a slideshow.

Boomers know the secret: sometimes there is no deeper reason, and pretending otherwise just extends the debate past bedtime.

It drove their kids crazy. It drives the grandkids crazier.

Its conviction rate remains a perfect 100 percent.

They Don’t Make ‘Em Like They Used To

Said while patting a 40-year-old refrigerator that has outlived three of its modern replacements.

The grandkids hear nostalgia.

But here’s the twist that makes this one insufferable: Boomers are often right.

The avocado-green fridge in the garage keeps humming while the smart fridge needs a software update.

Cast iron skillets, hand-me-down Buicks, the Sears tool set from 1978. Exhibits A through C.

The kids can roll their eyes all they want.

They’ll still fight each other for grandma’s mixer when the time comes.

You’re Always on That Phone

The modern classic, performed daily wherever a grandkid and a charging cable coexist.

The kids point out, fairly, that grandpa watches six hours of cable news, and grandma plays Candy Crush like it’s a part-time job.

The saying survives the hypocrisy charge unscathed.

Underneath the nagging is something softer: The grandparents want eye contact.

They drove across town for a visit, and the visit is competing with a screen.

The grandkids will get it eventually, probably the first time their own kid picks a tablet over them.

We Turned Out Fine

The all-purpose defense. No seatbelts, no bike helmets, drinking from the garden hose, riding in the truck bed.

We did all of it, and we turned out fine.

The grandkids, raised on car seats with five-point harnesses, hear this as a confession, not a brag.

The phrase works because it’s half true. The boomers did turn out fine.

It just glosses over a few details, which is exactly what makes the kids crazy: You can’t fact-check a vibe.

Still, every generation gets to be amazed it survived its own childhood. This is just the boomer version, served with a side of hose water.

If Your Friends Jumped Off a Bridge

The hypothetical that has tested the logic skills of every American child since the invention of peer pressure.

If all your friends jumped off a bridge, would you do it too?

The grandkids, sharp as ever, have started answering yes, just to watch the system crash.

One smart aleck per family will also note that, statistically, if all their friends jumped, there was probably a good reason.

Fire, perhaps.

The saying endures because the lesson under it never expires. Think for yourself.

The bridge changes every generation. These days it’s whatever’s trending.

Were You Born in a Barn?

Shouted at any grandkid who walks through a door and leaves it wide open, letting out the air conditioning that, per another classic, “costs money.”

The kids find it baffling on two levels.

One, they weren’t born in a barn. Two, what does a barn have to do with doors?

It’s a saying with roots older than the boomers themselves, handed down from farm-country grandparents who meant it a little more sincerely.

The door still gets left open. The barn question still gets asked.

Some rituals just come with the house.

You Sound Like a Broken Record

A perfect saying with one fatal flaw: The grandkids have never heard a broken record.

A scratched LP skips, repeating the same second of a song over and over. That’s the joke.

To a kid raised on Spotify, it lands like a riddle in a dead language.

The fun twist is that vinyl came roaring back, and now the grandkids own record players that grandma donated to Goodwill in 1994.

The saying might survive on irony alone.

Until then, boomers will keep saying it, and the kids will keep repeating that they don’t get it. Which, fittingly, sounds a bit like a broken record.

That’s Not Real Music

Delivered from the driver’s seat, one second after a grandkid connects to the car’s Bluetooth.

Real music, the argument goes, had guitars, lyrics you could understand, and bands that played their own instruments.

The Beatles, Zeppelin, Motown.

Music with a band photo where everyone’s wearing the same outfit.

The grandkids would like the record to show that boomer parents said the same thing about the Beatles.

Round and round it goes.

Every generation’s soundtrack is noise to the one before it, and a masterpiece to the one living it. The argument is the tradition.

Nobody Wants to Work Anymore

The newest entry in the catalog, and the one that gets the grandkids fired up the fastest.

The kids fire back with screenshots: rent charts, grocery prices, three-job side-hustle math.

The dinner table turns into a cable news panel before the rolls get passed.

Here’s the part both sides miss while they’re arguing: Newspapers have been printing some version of “nobody wants to work anymore” for over a century.