“Mum and dad” made some sense in the 60ies and 70ies when the first generation of tech-savvy people appeared, but certainly not now that these people are beyond retirement age. The division goes across generations, so we need another term, but what?
I agree that would be the perfect term since it means ‘average consumer’, but I know no other language where there is a direct equivalent (the closest is Welsh with ‘Mrs. Jones LLanrug’, but that’s only for media consumption). So one option would be to just use ‘Otto Normalverbraucher’ as if it was an English word.
If we want an English expression, we could of course just talk about ‘average users’ or ‘average consumer’, but something slightly catchier would be nice.
After a search on some online dictionaries, the closest I could find in English which appears to have a similar tone were ‘Joe Public’ or ‘Joe Bloggs’. (There are other like ‘the man on the Clapham omnibus’, but that’s too specificly British and a bit dated.)
Good grief. A lot of overthinking going on here. Must be all the bored folks stuck at home! Every word and phrase uttered by everyone ever does not need to be “one size fits all”. Sometimes a familiar colloquial phrase is best for conveying an idea.
I do not believe that’s the case @Chimpthepimp . Familiar colloquial phrases have attained their status precisely because they’re so popular and widespread. My wife and I have two kids, so ‘mum and dad’ includes me. Yet I am the technical one in the family. I take no offense to the phrase, because as @Manoj pointed out, I have tried explaining computing processes to my own parents over the phone, so I understand it completely. The phrase is perfect as-is, because it conveys so much with so few words. The collective experience of techies everywhere who helped their not-so-technical parents with a computing problem. It is completely irrelevant whether you yourself are a parent or not. I do not think any reasonable person would take offense at the phrase ‘mum and dad’, but I do think many reasonable persons would be alienated and excluded by more generic diluted language. Diluting the language into something generic motivates a potential new user to move on to something more interesting. The smartphone is a very personal device, which makes familiar language even more important for attracting new users and making them feel comfortable with making the switch.
As wide as this topic already is, you can see that there are quite some different opinion then yours, regarding these so called common expressions… But there were other common expressions in the history of languages, which nowadays would be considered rassist or other… But I see that this topic is not as dramatic as a rassist expression, but still My opinion is, that this mum and dad expression is including and excluding a lot of people who are actually the opposite nowadays and that it is not the best expression to stigmatise someone who is not tech affine, going with the time
