Hand-me-up

hand-me-up. Noun [countable]        

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 [transitive]  

'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        

'My driver is a hand-me-up from my son but it's still young, maybe 5 years old.'

Golfweb.com 26th February 2001

 

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.

 

Current use of the term hand-me-up is not restricted to items of clothing however. In the context of the transient technological development of 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, e.g.:

 

They got the Dell as a hand-me-up from my uncle when he upgraded his machine a couple of years ago.
Source: Macmillan buzz word