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Mar. 18th, 2004 02:49 pm
The future is retro!
At lunch, I glanced at an article which predicted that sales of digital cameras will outpace those of "film-based" ones within the next few years. It left me thinking, We're going to need a better retronym than "film-based camera".
A retronym is a term that comes into use when the general name for a class of things comes, by default, to refer to what was once a small subclass. The new name coined to distinguish the old default meaning is the retronym. My favourite examples is "acoustic guitar". Once all guitars were "acoustic". Then the electric guitar became ubiquitous in rock and pop and a new name had to be invented for those guitars that can't be plugged in. Other examples include "snail mail" (for those geeky, online types for whom unadorned "mail" means "e-mail") and "pocket watch" (now that almost every "watch" is a wristwatch). Both of these come from the Wikipedia, which has a nice sampling.
Any suggestions? I'm also wondering what we're eventually going to call the kind of phones that attach to a landline. I've heard "landline" used metonymically, but never a collocation like *landline phone. Also, what are we going to call old-fashioned monitors when everyone has a flat screen?
A retronym is a term that comes into use when the general name for a class of things comes, by default, to refer to what was once a small subclass. The new name coined to distinguish the old default meaning is the retronym. My favourite examples is "acoustic guitar". Once all guitars were "acoustic". Then the electric guitar became ubiquitous in rock and pop and a new name had to be invented for those guitars that can't be plugged in. Other examples include "snail mail" (for those geeky, online types for whom unadorned "mail" means "e-mail") and "pocket watch" (now that almost every "watch" is a wristwatch). Both of these come from the Wikipedia, which has a nice sampling.
Any suggestions? I'm also wondering what we're eventually going to call the kind of phones that attach to a landline. I've heard "landline" used metonymically, but never a collocation like *landline phone. Also, what are we going to call old-fashioned monitors when everyone has a flat screen?
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