Fun with words!

I recently saw a Washington Post column by Benjamin Dreyer which talked about words for obsolete actions or items that are still used, even though the actions and items are long gone. 

I suppose if you have a landline with a cradle and receiver, you could still hang up a phone, but are there still any rotary phones out there that you dial? Today, we hang up the phone by pressing a button - that's not really a button - or just waiting for the call to somehow disengage. We dial our smartphones via the keypad, but most of our calls (for those of us old school enough to actually talk on the phone) are placed by finding the contact and hitting the phone icon.

Dreyer also noted that, when we email, we routinely "cc" someone. One of those c's makes sense. The one that stands for copy. But the c that stands for carbon? Us old geezers will remember inserting a sheet of carbon paper between an original page and the copy, and rolling it into the typewriter.

He also pointed out that "we listen to podcasts, though who even owns an iPod anymore?" And that Microsoft Word uses the icon of a floppy disk for its Save function. (Some of us remember a time before there was any storage on a PC, and that, if you wanted to save a file, you saved it to a floppy disk.)

The Dreyer article got me scrounging around looking for other examples, and Merriam-Webster came through. They include carbon copy, dial, and hang up on their list, and note that there was something quite satisfying about hanging up a phone by slammig it down on the receiver. Alas, the only smartphone equivalent is hurling the phone against the wall.

We still use the term soap opera, which came from the time when soap manufacturers sponsored most of the overwrought, over-dramatic series broadcast on radio. Soap operas made the leap to TV, and they live there still. I don't watch any, but I understand that, while sponsors may include a laundry or dishwashing y, but are just as likely to run ads for a range of products and services. (Family aside on soap operas. My mother didn't listen to or watch soaps, but my grandmother was a fan. Until I was seven, we lived upstairts from Nanny's first floor flat in her triple decker. After lunch, my older sister Kath would go downstairs to hang with Nanny and listen to The Romance of Helen Trent. This would have been in the very early 1950's, before we all had TVs, but when everyone had radios. Anyway, after Kath came up a few times very distraught about something that had happened to Helen. My mother had no idea what Kath was upset about, but she sleuthed out that she was getting caught up in Nanny's soap opera. And that ended that.)

I have never given a thought to the origin of the word stereotype. It's "a kind of printing plate once commonly used in newspaper publishing," used to create a plate that printed an entire page at once. A good thing. Somehow, the word moved into the more pejorative usage we're familiar with. 

M-W talks about dime stores. Talk about obsolete. While low-priced stores are (thanks to inflation) now dollar stores, dime store is sometimes used to indicate that something's of dubious quality.  

M-W missed the boat on how dime is now used as a verb. As in "drop a dime" on someone, i.e., turning them in. Which goes back to days of yore when a) there were pay phones; and b) you dropped a dime into the slot to use one. 

I was surprised that neither Dreyer nor M-W came up with album, while we still use the word album to refer to a collection of songs put together on a record (which, even though vinyl records are making something of a comeback, mostly isn't a record). 

When I first starting buying records, an album was a LP (long playing) vinyl record containing a dozen or so songs, and slipcased into a flat cardboard "envelope." But for my parents' generation, an album was an actual album - a cardboard (sometimes leatherette-covered) "book" that contained multiple paper sleeves, each of which held a collection of 78 records made of brittle Bakelite.

Even if you didn't have a full album of records by the same artist, you had to keep these 78's in an album to protect them. But some albums were thematically or artistically of a piece. 

When my war-bride mother moved from Chicago to Worcester in 1946 - my Chicago mother met my Worcester father when he was stationed at Navy Pier in downtown Chicago towards the end of WWII - among the things packed in her trunk was an album of Nelson Eddy songs. We had a 1940's record player that played 45's and 78's, and a separate, more modern, stereo that could play 33's and 45's, but we loved to play those old 78's, often to make fun of Nelson Eddy, who we considered an unappealing fop. We couldn't believe that my mother had ever swooned over Nelson Eddy. But we lustily sang along with "Boots," "Shortnin' Bread," and "When I'm Calling You." (I haven't used them in years, but I believe that my skill at imitating Nelson Eddy is still intact. I think it's like riding a bicycle...)

Fun with words!