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The ghosts of technology in today’s language (2018)
- jolmg 7y agoCassette. That was a household word, right? Both for video and music cassettes. I haven't heard that word in many years, now.
- tefferon 7y agobicycles have a cassette of gears
- jolmg 7y agoI didn't know that was called a cassette. I always assumed cassettes were a type of cartridge with reeled tape.
- Pete_D 7y agoI figured it was from case + -ette, like a small case.
- kibwen 7y agoThe etymology of English "cassette" appears to come from the French word for "little box", which makes sense for tape cassettes but not for bicycle gearing. Considering that bicycle cassettes were invented in the 70s whereas tape cassettes are from the 60s, I'd be curious to know the reason for the name. https://www.etymonline.com/word/cassette https://www.etymonline.com/word/cassette
- NeedMoreTea 7y agoLittle box to hold a removable piece or mechanism, so seems a bit of a stretch unless cassette gears pop out for replacement? There were far earlier uses. The box that held the glass plates in early plate cameras was called a cassette.
- matheusmoreira 7y agoGenetic cassettes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_cassette https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_cassette
- ljm 7y agoColloquially, tape as a synonym for record (verb), or to 'get something on tape'. I'm still guilty of using it sometimes.
- taneq 7y agoFun fact, the word 'cassette' refers to the plastic box, not the tape inside. It's a 'cassette tape' because the tape is protected inside a cassette. You used to be able to get CD cassette drives where you had to put the CD into a removable cassette which you then inserted into the drive.
- rdiddly 7y ago"Album" meaning "blank tablet" in Latin is interesting because it seems to have the word "white" in it, same as in albumen (egg whites) and Albion (home of the White Cliffs).
- XaspR8d 7y agoYeah, a classic word formation pattern of using only a (visual) feature of an object to name and distinguish it. EtymOnline's explanation makes the connection even more direct: > from Latin album, which in classical times was a board chalked or painted white, upon which public notices (the Annales Maximi, edicts of the praetor, lists of senators, etc.) were inscribed in black, hence "a list of names." This Latin word was revived 16c. by German scholars, whose custom was to keep an album amicorum of colleagues' signatures; its meaning then expanded to "book with blank leaves meant to collect signatures and other souvenirs." > Latin album is literally "white color, whiteness;" it is a noun use of the neuter of the adjective albus "white" https://www.etymonline.com/word/album https://www.etymonline.com/word/album
- ljm 7y agoSo I suppose this would make one of The Beatles' seminal hits roughly translate to The Album Album?
- NeedMoreTea 7y agoAlbion comes from early Celtic rather than Latin. Originally naming all of Britain it changed at some point to refer to just Scotland, and gave the modern Scots Gaelic of Alba for Scotland.
- seszett 7y agoDoes Albion really mean Scotland in English? It means England in French.
- smcl 7y agoThere's no real common modern usage of "Albion" except in the name of football teams (West Bromwich Albion, Albion Rovers, Stirling Albion) - so it doesn't really mean one more than the other in English. Some people might say it comes from an old celtic word and therefore refers to Scotland, others might say it's from Latin and refers to England or the whole island of Britain. I've no idea which is "right" but the word just doesn't come up in everyday English.
- maestrokuro 7y agoHow uncanny. I was thinking about this in one of my lectures today after seeing that my lecturer spelt "online" as "on line" in one of his presentation slides. It turns out that the origin of the term "on line" dates back all the way to the telegraph industry!
- bsder 7y agoOne of my favorites is from VLSI. Finishing a chip is still called "Tape out" even though we quit using magtape for sending the design files to fab years ago.
- mrob 7y agoDidn't that refer to the adhesive tape used for hand-drawing optical masks?
- mrob 7y agoOne not included in the article: "balls-out", meaning "extreme" or "as fast as possible". It's thought to originate (although I haven't seen any authoritative sources for this) with centrifugal governors, which used spinning balls to regulate the speed of mechanical devices: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centrifugal_governor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centrifugal_governor
- errantspark 7y agoAhahah, came here to mention this. You beat me to it! Also called "balls to the wall".
- jacobolus 7y agoBalls to the wall has a different etymology. It implies pushing a throttle lever all the way forward. An airplane version of “pedal to the metal”. “Balls out” and “balls to the wall” are two different technological metaphors with the same general idea though (going at top speed).
- farrelmahaztra 7y agoI had a very different assumption of where those phrases came from until now
- gumby 7y agoBy the way, forcibly moderating the speed by grasping the governor was referred to in Victorian times (not making this up) as "cupping the governor's balls" which was one of those "plausible deniability" phrases (it was literally true so if someone objected they were the ones with the dirty mind).
- mirimir 7y agoBut those people knew that they were being risque, right?
- WalterBright 7y agoElectric cars still have a gas pedal :-)
- tefferon 7y agoaccelerator
- notzuck 7y agoNo they don't. You just use the wrong word. Try accelerator.
- WalterBright 7y agoWe can compromise and call it the "throttle" :-)
- saagarjha 7y agoBut the steering wheel is an accelerator too…
- 49531 7y agoIf y'all don't follow Marcin Wichary on Twitter you're missing out on a lot of great content. He's consistently highlighting interesting intersections of history, technology, and how humans live within it all. Twitter can often times be an unpleasant place and he's always a bright spot in the noise: https://twitter.com/mwichary https://twitter.com/mwichary
- 49531 7y agoHere is one of my favorite threads by Marcin: https://twitter.com/mwichary/status/996056615928266752 https://twitter.com/mwichary/status/996056615928266752
- jacobolus 7y ago> what would be the oldest extant word based on technology no longer in use Hard to beat “calculate”, which is about finding numerical answers by moving pebbles around a counting board.
- Retric 7y agoMany of these technologies are really old, burning the midnight oil refers to oil lamps that date back at lest, 15,000 years ago. Various sailing references date back a minimum of 7,500 years old but could easily be much older technology. Computing via moving pebbles could easily be a surprisingly recent idea ~500 BCE, but again it’s very difficult to date this stuff.
- jacobolus 7y ago> Computing via moving pebbles could easily be a surprisingly recent idea ~500 BCE By the 5th century BCE, Herodotus was writing about how Egyptians and Hellenes used their counting boards in different ways; by that point the technology was apparently widespread and taken for granted. It’s hard to judge when a counting board with an explicit place-value system (where the tokens could represent different quantities depending on position) first arose, but I’d guess no later than like 2000 BCE, and possibly much earlier. If you allow “pebbles” to also include little clay counters, and counting with them to include piling them up and changing units by trading one type of counter for another, then we have physical examples from 7500 BCE. We have much older evidence still of counting via tally marks, because as archaeological evidence those are relatively easy to interpret. If people longer ago were counting with pebbles there’s almost no way we’d know it. * * * > burning the midnight oil refers to oil lamps that date back at lest, 15,000 years ago I take this phrase to mean doing some kind of scholarly work (reading/writing) late into the night. Apparently comes from Quarles (1635), Emblemes: “Wee spend our mid-day sweat, or mid-night oyle; Wee tyre the night in thought; the day in toyle.” So while burning stuff to make light is an old technology, this is not too old a metaphor. Can you think of sailing metaphors which etymologically arose thousands of years ago, in forms still used? Obviously literal words like “ship”, “mast”, “row”, “sheet”, “wind”, “knot”, etc. are very old. Also, sailing is a technology still in use. :-)
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- mkoryak 7y agoThey should have also mentioned the word "modem", which is actually an abbreviation but not many people know that.
- jacobolus 7y agoNobody uses the word “modem” anymore; it isn’t a metaphor that worked its way into general speech. It’s just a dead word for a dead technology.
- hoseja 7y agoDead? That's like calling a transistor a dead technology. They just mostly stopped being their own little boxes. Unless you mean dial-up modems specifically.
- jacobolus 7y agoFair enough. I mean dial-up modems of the 1990s used to connect computers to the internet over the phone network by making a local telephone call. Those were the only type people in the broader public ever knew about. Otherwise, the word “modem” both before and since is just niche technical jargon, ignored by laypeople.
- nineteen999 7y agoMaybe in terms of POTS modems, but otherwise no. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_modem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_modem https://www.campbellsci.com.au/sat-inmarsat-bgan https://www.campbellsci.com.au/sat-inmarsat-bgan https://www.orbcomm.com/en/hardware/devices/modems https://www.orbcomm.com/en/hardware/devices/modems
- salawat 7y agoThe heck? Modulator/demodulator is still used. In fact, I generally have great success in using it to illustrate the demarcation between LAN and WAN for non techie users. Your LAN ends at your router. Your WAN begins at your modem. Your modem is the thing the ISP gives that gives you access to the Internet. While it doesn't do the heavy lifting of converting digital traffic to/from analog signals anymore, it makes a very good nominative identifier for the particular purpose of identifying the piece of hardware that still fulfills the role of enabling connectivity with the world at large.
- amitnishad 7y agothanks for technology language easy to help https://www.alltopinterviewquestions.com https://www.alltopinterviewquestions.com
- aitchnyu 7y agoChecks and balances refers to James Watt era machinery. IIRC, couldn't google. Kubernetes/Cyber/Gubernotorial/Governor means rudder.
- bencollier49 7y agoRound our way if something is rubbish, it's often referred to as "bobbins": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bobbin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bobbin
- hemmert 7y agoA couple of years ago, I gave a TEDx talk on "how our body understands the digital world", which also picks up the topic of language/tech metaphors: https://youtube.com/watch?v=oXWyfFyWACI https://youtube.com/watch?v=oXWyfFyWACI