I sometimes find, when talking to my contemporaries, that some of what has become my personal vernacular over the years refers to things that aren’t really part of the common & general knowledge, for one reason or another.
One such term is the “Rube Goldberg machine“–I’d say that less than 10% of the people who I drop that term around in Real World conversation
This was recently brought to mind in some discussions of one of the OK Go videos–I found myself explaining the Rube Goldberg reference a lot.
If it comes up again, instead of pointing people at the Wikipedia entry, I shall instead point them to the recent Golden Age Comic Book Stories entry which has lots of examples of Goldberg comics–including some from the Stupid Questions series, and some of the classic machines.
Like this one:
