College Professor Shares Student's Email Asking About The 'Late 1900s'—And Yeah, We're Ancient

A professor on X, formerly Twitter, just shared a student email that officially makes us feel like living dust.

Bucknell University associate professor and chair of religious studies John Penniman took to the social media platform to share the aforementioned email, captioning his post:

"I will never recover from this student email."

And honestly same, professor. Same.

In the email, a student asked Penniman if using a source from 1994 would be acceptable given it was published nearly three decades ago.

That's fair.

But the way the student worded the query delivered quite the blow to those of us born in the 20th century.

The student wrote:

"Good afternoon Professor Penniman, Hope you had a great break!"

"I was wondering if it would be acceptable to use sources from the late 1900s for our final paper (I found an interesting paper from 1994)."

"Is there a cut off date for publication? See you tomorrow."

@Historiographos/X

Late 1900s—LATE. 1900s! 💀💀💀💀💀

But in all seriousness, it hurts.

This terminology took social media by storm and many of us may never recover.

Penniman himself responded to the viral nature of his post—which has racked up 22 million views—by way of tweet, writing:

"15 years of yeoman's work here on the bird site and all it took was an accidental KO from a thoughtful student."

We wonder if this student will ever know the agony they brought upon an entire generation just by being responsible...and technically correct 😩.