“Modern” sounds old. The word itself strikes me as one looking off to the bright and distant future of radio wave communications and automobiles.
“Aren’t we such modern gentlemen? Why, just look at this light bulb I had installed in my study!”
“Indeed, indeed, quite modern we are.”
Modern, the word, dates back to the 1500s. I imagine Elizabethan physicians selling “modern” cures for plague — dried toad and lily root tinctures being the most apotheosized medicines and only for the rich, of course. The word itself was “modern” for a time — when did it stop adequately describing itself? I find that modern tends to be used in positive terms. Only things that are favourable are modern, and when we find out that they are no longer adequate, they become archaic.
It would seem that objects bearing the description of modern, by sheer self-imposed semantics, can only be as such for an undefined but limited period of time. At the very moment that the description is applied it begins to decay. Both “outdated” and “antiquated” could exist forever if we let them, but “modern” works itself out of the job.
