6 ms·

I have to ask. Why is it "white"-board vs. "chalk"-board? Back in elementary school, I learned to call the former "black"-board.

gumby 4y ago
Not an explantion, but I do remember when they first arrived (there was one the year I began high school -- new physics teacher got to set it up how he wanted) and no new ones when I left. I also saw then appear at MIT, again, mainly new construction/renovation. Chalk boards came in black or green. That name is lost in history, to me. Whiteboards were kind of a shock by comparison -- bright rather than dark -- so it did seem natural. "Marker board" sounds funny now, though it makes sense ("not chalk") but I suppose had it caught on it would be normal. I've only seen "dry erase" used on packages so I assume it's a branding issue. While the one at my HS was the first one I'd seen (and, seemingly the first any of my classmates had seen, as it was a minor topic of dicussion) I think we'd at least heard of them. This was 1978.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- b112 4y ago
  "dry erase" means the ink comes off even when dry, as opposed to a permanent marker. Also, after a long time, even dry erase needs toothpaste to come off.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - rationalist 4y ago
    I've never heard of using toothpaste, but one can take off old dry erase or even permanent marker by going over it with fresh dry erase, then erasing normally.
    - b112 4y ago
      A good hint, but toothpaste is awesome. Not only does it keep the cavity creeps away, it also can remove stains in wood finishing. I once had a bottle of alcohol spill a little, and it discoloured the wood table stain. Toothpaste fixed it. And the room smelled minty after, too!
e0 4y ago
Regional variation? When I was growing up (in California, in the 1970s and 80s), we called them chalkboards because, you know, you used chalk to write on them. Also, they were often green. Do you call it 'soda' or 'pop'?
- echelon 4y ago
  > Do you call it 'soda' or 'pop'? 'coke'
- keithalewis 4y ago
  'Obesity juice'
  - datkam 4y ago
    "Fat-free"
- dkdbejwi383 4y ago
  > Do you call it 'soda' or 'pop'? Soft drink
- euroderf 4y ago
  "Soda pop" is also a valid answer.
- ghaff 4y ago
  Or "tonic" (which was already a somewhat archaic term for soda generally in the Boston area when I was going to school). Boston had a number of those. Frappe was another--which you still see now and then at old-timey ice cream places. (A "milk shake" was just flavored milk.)
- michaelcampbell 4y ago
  "pop" where I grew up in the midwest, but now that I'm in/near Atlanta, it's mostly "coke" regardless of variety.
hcazz 4y ago
To me at least, the different types are easy to understand. White-board - the color of the board is white, it is used for dry erase markers. Black-board - the color of the board is black, it is used with chalk. Chalk-board - the color of the board doesn't matter, it likely uses chalk to write with and is therefore a "blackboard" as well.
- Izkata 4y ago
  Chalkboards are green, it just happens that the name also encompasses blackboards.
dools 4y ago
Ronald Susskind uses a white board and calls it a black board
- dools 4y ago
  Ronald!? Leonard... now I can't edit it and forever I will look like an idiot.
  - b112 4y ago
    Just tell people it's his muddle name.
geocar 4y ago
In português it's "quadro branco" (a white board/rectangle/frame on the wall or on a stand) and "lousa" (which refers to the material and/or its colour and texture). I think "chalkboards" and "lousa" can be black, grey, blue, brown, purple, red, or green, but maybe "blackboard" can only be black.
- elzbardico 4y ago
  "Lousa" is more of a PT_pt thing. In PT_br, "quadro negro" was more usual, but most of them were painted dark green, go figure!
- the_af 4y ago
  In Spanish we call a blackboard a "pizarrón", which references the slate its made of.
guntherhermann 4y ago
In the UK they still call them "blackboards", I've never seen a green one over here.
- NamTaf 4y ago
  Yup, as an Aussie my understanding is that UK English would call it a blackboard whereas US English would call it a chalkboard. AU English therefore followed the UK, regardless of if they're the dark angels-esque green or fully black colour.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    I've pretty much always heard it as blackboard in the US though I wouldn't do a double-take if someone called it a chalkboard. I'm pretty sure I've seen green variants but not at all commonly.
OJFord 4y ago
I've never heard 'chalkboard' before fwiw.
snozolli 4y ago
I was born in the 70s, raised in Oregon, and we called them chalkboards. "Blackboard" sounded old-timey to me, like something you'd hear on Little House on the Prairie. A Google search result points out that green became a common color for chalkboards, and in retrospect I think most of mine in school were green. More googling says that the original blackboards were slate. The green ones were porcelain.
- IIsi50MHz 4y ago
  Our green ones varied in quality and material. Most of them seemed to have some cheap coating that was sometimes torn by chalk; after being torn, the edges of green coating seemed stretched like thin plastic. Some of the green ones, the teachers actually liked. Maybe those were porcelain? Also had blackboards at some of my schools. They seem to last forever without much care.
cleanchit 4y ago
I prefer dark-mode and light-mode.
reportgunner 4y ago
Isn't it the same like whitelist and blacklist ?
jjgreen 4y ago
Hypersensitivity to the word "black". Comments about "chalkboard" being more accurate should only be accepted if the proponent also uses "penboard".
- eesmith 4y ago
  I think you are projecting your own hypersensitivity into your understanding of the topic. Green chalkboards, like my schools had as a kid, were not black. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackboard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackboard points out "Green porcelain enamel surface, was first used in 1930, and as this type of boards became popular, the word "chalkboard" appeared. In the US green porcelain enamelled boards started to appear at schools in 1950s." To double-check, see the Google Ngram comparison at https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=blackboard%2Cchalkboard&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=3 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=blackboard%2Cc... The use of "chalkboard" doesn't really exist before the 1940s, and increases rapidly in the 1950s, reaching the current rate (of about 50% of the usage of "blackboard") in the the 1960s.
  - jjgreen 4y ago
    Blackboards are not black, they are grey; robin red-breasts do not have red breasts, those are orange; Redheads do not have red hair, they have orange-brown, and so on. So why is it that black is renamed on the grounds of accuracy? > I think you are projecting your own hypersensitivity I'm puzzled by this, could you elucidate? I'm with James Brown "Say It Loud – I'm Black and I'm Proud", I don't see black as a negative, so I don't see why the word should be avoided.
    - eesmith 4y ago
      > Blackboards are not black, they are grey Yes, and tennis shoes aren't only used for tennis. What you wrote is not correct. First, I assume you are not making the technically-correct-only assertion that since everything, including Vantablack, reflects some light, it isn't truly black but only a dark shade of grey. Quoting Wikipedia, "Blackboards were originally made of smooth, thin sheets of black or dark grey slate stone". That's "black" and "dark grey". But you don't need to take Wikipedia's work. We can look at books from a century ago and read a book where they improvised a blackboard using black paint: "This space was carefully sandpapered and immediately after received its first coat of black paint, prepared with oil, which served as a foundation. After 24 hours, another layer of the black color followed, (this time without oil) and finally, in two more days, the black brush completed, from every standpoint, a perfect blackboard." https://archive.org/details/jstor-3406078/page/n1/mode/2up?q=blackboard https://archive.org/details/jstor-3406078/page/n1/mode/2up?q... Or the 1905 book "Nelson's blackboard drawing" which mentions "So long as the black surface of the board is visible, the sketch is quite conventional" at https://archive.org/details/b1625318/page/n121/mode/2up?q=black https://archive.org/details/b1625318/page/n121/mode/2up?q=bl... . (As an aside, there are some excellent chalk drawings in that book.) Thus, black surfaces for chalk use in a classroom have long been referred to as "blackboards." You can see the transition to "chalkboard" in the 1950s (emphasis mine in the following) in a 1955 publication saying "And don’t overlook the old standby, the chalkboard. Notice that we refer to it as a chalkboard, since it is not black. A green board and yellow chalk will not produce the halo effect that results from using white chalk on a blackboard. You can make a simple and inexpensive chalkboard by painting the smooth side of a piece of tempered masonite with green chalkboard paint." https://archive.org/details/CAT10679308/page/2/mode/2up?q=chalkboard https://archive.org/details/CAT10679308/page/2/mode/2up?q=ch... As well as in this 1953 newspaper article titled "Britain Bans Old-Fashioned Blackboard For The New Colored Chalkboard", wherein we read how "a slab of black on the wall has a tendency to create a dark, depressing, uncomfortable and gloomy atmosphere", and how they will be replaced "with a 'chalkboard' in some one of nine brighter colors" https://archive.org/details/1953-04-11-1953-04-30/page/n167/mode/2up?q=chalkboard https://archive.org/details/1953-04-11-1953-04-30/page/n167/... . The trend continues, like this 1962 comment that "The chalkboard (blackboard) is one of the oldest graphic or visual instruction devices. The earlier slate blackboard has now been replaced by white, green, or yellow satin-surfaced or glareproof glass or plastic chalk-board." at https://archive.org/details/audiovisualmater0000unse/page/66/mode/2up?q=blackboard https://archive.org/details/audiovisualmater0000unse/page/66... By the 1970s you can see Sears referring to an "old-fashioned blackboard" as a "black chalkboard" at https://archive.org/details/1970-1979-sears-wishbook-toys_202211/page/n1155/mode/2up?q=blackboard+ https://archive.org/details/1970-1979-sears-wishbook-toys_20... and at the bottom of the page is a flip chalkboard with described as blue on one side and black on the other. > So why is it that black is renamed on the grounds of accuracy? As they said in the 1950s, "we refer to it as a chalkboard, since it is not black." While your "hypersensitivity" hypothesis doesn't explain why the changing usage started in the pre-Civil Rights era of the 1950s, and including the UK. > could you elucidate I think you are hypersensitive to the idea that others are hypersensitive to using the term black. I think you are so hypersensitive that you dismissed counter-evidence out of hand, without further examination.
vishnugupta 4y ago
> Back in elementary school, I learned to call the former "black"-board. Same here. It’s still called black board in my part of the world, I think.
diffeomorphism 4y ago
Because many chalkboards are a greenish color instead. Even slates are often more dark greyish than black.
culopatin 4y ago
Because some chalk boards are green

gumby 4y ago

Not an explantion, but I do remember when they first arrived (there was one the year I began high school -- new physics teacher got to set it up how he wanted) and no new ones when I left. I also saw then appear at MIT, again, mainly new construction/renovation. Chalk boards came in black or green. That name is lost in history, to me. Whiteboards were kind of a shock by comparison -- bright rather than dark -- so it did seem natural. "Marker board" sounds funny now, though it makes sense ("not chalk") but I suppose had it caught on it would be normal. I've only seen "dry erase" used on packages so I assume it's a branding issue. While the one at my HS was the first one I'd seen (and, seemingly the first any of my classmates had seen, as it was a minor topic of dicussion) I think we'd at least heard of them. This was 1978.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
b112 4y ago
"dry erase" means the ink comes off even when dry, as opposed to a permanent marker. Also, after a long time, even dry erase needs toothpaste to come off.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- rationalist 4y ago
  I've never heard of using toothpaste, but one can take off old dry erase or even permanent marker by going over it with fresh dry erase, then erasing normally.
  - b112 4y ago
    A good hint, but toothpaste is awesome. Not only does it keep the cavity creeps away, it also can remove stains in wood finishing. I once had a bottle of alcohol spill a little, and it discoloured the wood table stain. Toothpaste fixed it. And the room smelled minty after, too!

e0 4y ago

Regional variation? When I was growing up (in California, in the 1970s and 80s), we called them chalkboards because, you know, you used chalk to write on them. Also, they were often green. Do you call it 'soda' or 'pop'?

echelon 4y ago
> Do you call it 'soda' or 'pop'? 'coke'
keithalewis 4y ago
'Obesity juice'
- datkam 4y ago
  "Fat-free"
dkdbejwi383 4y ago
> Do you call it 'soda' or 'pop'? Soft drink
euroderf 4y ago
"Soda pop" is also a valid answer.
ghaff 4y ago
Or "tonic" (which was already a somewhat archaic term for soda generally in the Boston area when I was going to school). Boston had a number of those. Frappe was another--which you still see now and then at old-timey ice cream places. (A "milk shake" was just flavored milk.)
michaelcampbell 4y ago
"pop" where I grew up in the midwest, but now that I'm in/near Atlanta, it's mostly "coke" regardless of variety.

hcazz 4y ago

To me at least, the different types are easy to understand. White-board - the color of the board is white, it is used for dry erase markers. Black-board - the color of the board is black, it is used with chalk. Chalk-board - the color of the board doesn't matter, it likely uses chalk to write with and is therefore a "blackboard" as well.

Izkata 4y ago
Chalkboards are green, it just happens that the name also encompasses blackboards.

dools 4y ago

Ronald Susskind uses a white board and calls it a black board

dools 4y ago
Ronald!? Leonard... now I can't edit it and forever I will look like an idiot.
- b112 4y ago
  Just tell people it's his muddle name.

geocar 4y ago

In português it's "quadro branco" (a white board/rectangle/frame on the wall or on a stand) and "lousa" (which refers to the material and/or its colour and texture). I think "chalkboards" and "lousa" can be black, grey, blue, brown, purple, red, or green, but maybe "blackboard" can only be black.

elzbardico 4y ago
"Lousa" is more of a PT_pt thing. In PT_br, "quadro negro" was more usual, but most of them were painted dark green, go figure!
the_af 4y ago
In Spanish we call a blackboard a "pizarrón", which references the slate its made of.

guntherhermann 4y ago

In the UK they still call them "blackboards", I've never seen a green one over here.

NamTaf 4y ago
Yup, as an Aussie my understanding is that UK English would call it a blackboard whereas US English would call it a chalkboard. AU English therefore followed the UK, regardless of if they're the dark angels-esque green or fully black colour.
- ghaff 4y ago
  I've pretty much always heard it as blackboard in the US though I wouldn't do a double-take if someone called it a chalkboard. I'm pretty sure I've seen green variants but not at all commonly.

OJFord 4y ago

I've never heard 'chalkboard' before fwiw.

snozolli 4y ago

I was born in the 70s, raised in Oregon, and we called them chalkboards. "Blackboard" sounded old-timey to me, like something you'd hear on Little House on the Prairie. A Google search result points out that green became a common color for chalkboards, and in retrospect I think most of mine in school were green. More googling says that the original blackboards were slate. The green ones were porcelain.

IIsi50MHz 4y ago
Our green ones varied in quality and material. Most of them seemed to have some cheap coating that was sometimes torn by chalk; after being torn, the edges of green coating seemed stretched like thin plastic. Some of the green ones, the teachers actually liked. Maybe those were porcelain? Also had blackboards at some of my schools. They seem to last forever without much care.

cleanchit 4y ago

I prefer dark-mode and light-mode.

reportgunner 4y ago

Isn't it the same like whitelist and blacklist ?

jjgreen 4y ago

Hypersensitivity to the word "black". Comments about "chalkboard" being more accurate should only be accepted if the proponent also uses "penboard".

eesmith 4y ago
I think you are projecting your own hypersensitivity into your understanding of the topic. Green chalkboards, like my schools had as a kid, were not black. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackboard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackboard points out "Green porcelain enamel surface, was first used in 1930, and as this type of boards became popular, the word "chalkboard" appeared. In the US green porcelain enamelled boards started to appear at schools in 1950s." To double-check, see the Google Ngram comparison at https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=blackboard%2Cchalkboard&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=3 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=blackboard%2Cc... The use of "chalkboard" doesn't really exist before the 1940s, and increases rapidly in the 1950s, reaching the current rate (of about 50% of the usage of "blackboard") in the the 1960s.
- jjgreen 4y ago
  Blackboards are not black, they are grey; robin red-breasts do not have red breasts, those are orange; Redheads do not have red hair, they have orange-brown, and so on. So why is it that black is renamed on the grounds of accuracy? > I think you are projecting your own hypersensitivity I'm puzzled by this, could you elucidate? I'm with James Brown "Say It Loud – I'm Black and I'm Proud", I don't see black as a negative, so I don't see why the word should be avoided.
  - eesmith 4y ago
    > Blackboards are not black, they are grey Yes, and tennis shoes aren't only used for tennis. What you wrote is not correct. First, I assume you are not making the technically-correct-only assertion that since everything, including Vantablack, reflects some light, it isn't truly black but only a dark shade of grey. Quoting Wikipedia, "Blackboards were originally made of smooth, thin sheets of black or dark grey slate stone". That's "black" and "dark grey". But you don't need to take Wikipedia's work. We can look at books from a century ago and read a book where they improvised a blackboard using black paint: "This space was carefully sandpapered and immediately after received its first coat of black paint, prepared with oil, which served as a foundation. After 24 hours, another layer of the black color followed, (this time without oil) and finally, in two more days, the black brush completed, from every standpoint, a perfect blackboard." https://archive.org/details/jstor-3406078/page/n1/mode/2up?q=blackboard https://archive.org/details/jstor-3406078/page/n1/mode/2up?q... Or the 1905 book "Nelson's blackboard drawing" which mentions "So long as the black surface of the board is visible, the sketch is quite conventional" at https://archive.org/details/b1625318/page/n121/mode/2up?q=black https://archive.org/details/b1625318/page/n121/mode/2up?q=bl... . (As an aside, there are some excellent chalk drawings in that book.) Thus, black surfaces for chalk use in a classroom have long been referred to as "blackboards." You can see the transition to "chalkboard" in the 1950s (emphasis mine in the following) in a 1955 publication saying "And don’t overlook the old standby, the chalkboard. Notice that we refer to it as a chalkboard, since it is not black. A green board and yellow chalk will not produce the halo effect that results from using white chalk on a blackboard. You can make a simple and inexpensive chalkboard by painting the smooth side of a piece of tempered masonite with green chalkboard paint." https://archive.org/details/CAT10679308/page/2/mode/2up?q=chalkboard https://archive.org/details/CAT10679308/page/2/mode/2up?q=ch... As well as in this 1953 newspaper article titled "Britain Bans Old-Fashioned Blackboard For The New Colored Chalkboard", wherein we read how "a slab of black on the wall has a tendency to create a dark, depressing, uncomfortable and gloomy atmosphere", and how they will be replaced "with a 'chalkboard' in some one of nine brighter colors" https://archive.org/details/1953-04-11-1953-04-30/page/n167/mode/2up?q=chalkboard https://archive.org/details/1953-04-11-1953-04-30/page/n167/... . The trend continues, like this 1962 comment that "The chalkboard (blackboard) is one of the oldest graphic or visual instruction devices. The earlier slate blackboard has now been replaced by white, green, or yellow satin-surfaced or glareproof glass or plastic chalk-board." at https://archive.org/details/audiovisualmater0000unse/page/66/mode/2up?q=blackboard https://archive.org/details/audiovisualmater0000unse/page/66... By the 1970s you can see Sears referring to an "old-fashioned blackboard" as a "black chalkboard" at https://archive.org/details/1970-1979-sears-wishbook-toys_202211/page/n1155/mode/2up?q=blackboard+ https://archive.org/details/1970-1979-sears-wishbook-toys_20... and at the bottom of the page is a flip chalkboard with described as blue on one side and black on the other. > So why is it that black is renamed on the grounds of accuracy? As they said in the 1950s, "we refer to it as a chalkboard, since it is not black." While your "hypersensitivity" hypothesis doesn't explain why the changing usage started in the pre-Civil Rights era of the 1950s, and including the UK. > could you elucidate I think you are hypersensitive to the idea that others are hypersensitive to using the term black. I think you are so hypersensitive that you dismissed counter-evidence out of hand, without further examination.

vishnugupta 4y ago

> Back in elementary school, I learned to call the former "black"-board. Same here. It’s still called black board in my part of the world, I think.

diffeomorphism 4y ago

Because many chalkboards are a greenish color instead. Even slates are often more dark greyish than black.

culopatin 4y ago

Because some chalk boards are green