hand-me-up (noun) something that a younger person gives to an older person because they no longer use it or they have something better to replace it
hand-me-up (adjective)
hand-me-up (verb)
‘And more and more older users are joining the throng as PC prices fall and adult children give “hand-me-up” computers to mom and dad …’
(BusinessWeek, 9th July 1998)
It would seem that there is evidence for use of the term hand-me-up as far back as the 1980s, where it was originally associated with the idea of passing on articles of clothing from children to their parents or older members of their family. Just as younger children conventionally suffer the sometimes humiliating experience of wearing the hand-me-down clothes of their older siblings, often as an economy, in the same way parents have been incorporating their children’s clothes into their wardrobe to compensate for the wasteful habits of fashion-conscious teenagers.
A father who is not so selective about fit or fashion wears the hand-me-up T-shirt of his son, declaring that it is ‘like new’. A mother talks about her most fashionable outfit consisting of hand-me-ups from her oldest daughter. There is also evidence for the use of hand-me-up as a verb, as in: The belt was hand-me-upped to my very petite sister Rachel, who is six years older.
Current use of the term hand-me-up is not restricted to items of clothing however. In the context of the speed with which technology has developed in the last decade, where devices are continuously being re-cast with enhanced capacity and design, the idea of a hand-me-up has gained considerable ground. The mobile phone boom has been a major contributor to the hand-me-up phenomenon – parents are often the recipients of their children’s cast-off phones, and are being educated in how to use them by their children. Similarly, a common context is the acquisition of newer, sleeker and faster computing technology,
e.g. "They got the Dell as a hand-me-up from my uncle when he upgraded his machine a couple of years ago."
5 October 2006 | 
Parkophobia - The Fear of Parking
