“Backspace” is already a misnomer: the original intention was for it to move the caret one position back, the other way around from the usual space, thus enabli

“Backspace” is already a misnomer: the original intention was for it to move the caret one position back, the other way around from the usual space, thus enabling overstriking (whence also the characters _ ^ ` , unheard of before the typewriter age). You can still see this used by the troff|less internals of man, which encode underline and bold as _<BS>a and a<BS>a respectively.