The ghosts of technology in today’s language (2018)

https://medium.com/@mwichary/the-ghost-tech-in-todays-language-c3becc9ae30b

by takinola • 7 years ago

99 56 7 years ago

jolmg2• 7 years ago

Cassette. That was a household word, right? Both for video and music cassettes. I haven't heard that word in many years, now.

tefferon2• 7 years ago

bicycles have a cassette of gears

jolmg2• 7 years ago

I didn't know that was called a cassette. I always assumed cassettes were a type of cartridge with reeled tape.

matheusmoreira• 7 years ago

Genetic cassettes:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_cassette

ljm2• 7 years ago

Colloquially, tape as a synonym for record (verb), or to 'get something on tape'. I'm still guilty of using it sometimes.

taneq• 7 years ago

Fun 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• 7 years 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• 7 years ago

Yeah, 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

ljm2• 7 years ago

So I suppose this would make one of The Beatles' seminal hits roughly translate to The Album Album?

NeedMoreTea4• 7 years ago

Albion 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• 7 years ago

Does Albion really mean Scotland in English? It means England in French.

alberto_ol• 7 years ago

According to this source it comes likely from latin https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=Albion+

maestrokuro• 7 years ago

How 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!

bsder2• 7 years ago

One 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.

mrob2• 7 years ago

Didn't that refer to the adhesive tape used for hand-drawing optical masks?

pjc50• 7 years ago

Yes, "rubylith" was used for the 6502.

bsder2• 7 years ago

Perhaps, but I don't remember it in that context. Maybe someone older than me might remember.

I do remember it from back when we used to mail reel-to-reel magtapes around.

mrob2• 7 years ago

One 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

errantspark• 7 years ago

Ahahah, came here to mention this. You beat me to it! Also called "balls to the wall".

jacobolus7• 7 years ago

Balls 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).

gumby2• 7 years ago

By 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• 7 years ago

But those people knew that they were being risque, right?

WalterBright2• 7 years ago

Electric cars still have a gas pedal :-)

tefferon2• 7 years ago

accelerator

notzuck2• 7 years ago

No they don't. You just use the wrong word. Try accelerator.

WalterBright2• 7 years ago

We can compromise and call it the "throttle" :-)

saagarjha2• 7 years ago

But the steering wheel is an accelerator too…

495312• 7 years ago

If 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

495312• 7 years ago

Here is one of my favorite threads by Marcin: https://twitter.com/mwichary/status/996056615928266752

jacobolus7• 7 years 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.

Retric2• 7 years ago

Many 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.

jacobolus7• 7 years 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. :-)

mkoryak• 7 years ago

They should have also mentioned the word "modem", which is actually an abbreviation but not many people know that.

jacobolus7• 7 years ago

Nobody 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• 7 years ago

Dead? 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.

nineteen999• 7 years ago

Maybe in terms of POTS modems, but otherwise no.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_modem

https://www.campbellsci.com.au/sat-inmarsat-bgan

https://www.orbcomm.com/en/hardware/devices/modems

salawat• 7 years ago

The 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• 7 years ago

thanks for technology language easy to help https://www.alltopinterviewquestions.com

aitchnyu• 7 years ago

Checks and balances refers to James Watt era machinery. IIRC, couldn't google.

Kubernetes/Cyber/Gubernotorial/Governor means rudder.

bencollier49• 7 years ago

Round our way if something is rubbish, it's often referred to as "bobbins":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bobbin

hemmert• 7 years ago

A 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

The ghosts of technology in today’s language (2018)

Related Stories