Retro Chic

Progress brings with it a host of new terms to learn: spin doctors and acid rain, gluons and black holes, scuzzy drives and neutron bombs. These terms are called neologisms, bright and shiny new words and word combinations for bright and shiny new things invented, discovered, recognized, theorized.

Neologisms open up spaces in our brains; every new unit of communication gives us a new tool for analysis, a novel means of understanding. The world changes when we learn a word. The universe becomes suddenly more vast and unsettled when we learn the term dark matter. Although such a word was produced by a scientific theory, the result of years of observations we didn’t make ourselves, and lots of math we probably couldn’t do, useful metaphors nonetheless cascade from the poetry of those two words in combination–we consider the dark matter of our body politic, our psyches, our souls.

And, of course, neologisms make the world more complex, even downright annoying. We have all suffered the nuisance of RAMs and ROMs that won’t keep straight, the intellectual debasement of infotainment, the pretension of trendy postmodern multimediacrat jargon.

But progress also creates another class of new terms: new words for old things. These terms are called retronyms: new names for old friends. Although the thing refered to by a retronym is usually long familiar, these terms mark out a new position for that thing in the shifting web of meaning. The things themselves haven’t changed, but the semantic real estate over which they once claimed sole possession has been subdivided, re-zoned. A few examples:

acoustic guitar

broadcast TV

voice phone number

Each of these terms used to be simple, the modifiers unnecessary. Every guitar was acoustic, all TV was broadcast, every phone number connected one with a voice; thus there was no need to specify. But with the advent of electric guitars, cable TV, and faxes (and all other telephone-line applications, current or yet to be invented), more specificity became necessary. Each invention required a pair of new terms to be created: one for the new invention, another for the original version.

Most neologisms are created by changing technology, so are most retronyms. The radio telescope, the jet airplane, and the personal computer necessitated these retronyms:

But not all retronyms are the result of new toys. Sometimes, a retronym signals a change in how humans conceive of reality. For example:

These retronyms are of course rather old, but not as ancient as you might think. The unconscious mind was only theorized in the 1800s. Before that, the terms mind and consciousness were basically interchangeable. The existence of spectra beyond the visible (x-rays, infra red, etc.) was discovered still later. The idea of an invisible spectrum was once a contradiction in terms. The very fact that we are used to them now shows how completely the ideas that necessitated these retronyms have become common sense.

Some retronyms show a distinct lack of imagination:

Indeed, in the awkward period before a retronym is created, a generic retronym is often used. This can be created by adding normal, plain old, or regular, or simply by saying the root word twice, as in:

This technique often has the effect of rhetorically allying the speaker with the old format, as in:

Of course, sometimes the speaker wants to ally with the neologism, and therefore use a perjorative retronym. Technologists are particularly enamoured of the words plain old for generating retronyms. Thus:

To give credit where it is due, technologists have also constructed more creative perjorative retronyms, as evidenced in the euphonious and deadly accurate:

Sometimes technologists create unecessary retronyms, however. My Personal Digital Assistant has a row of "hard icons" on the bottom. These are called hard icons because they are unchanging. They don’t appear, disappear, and gray out as the icons on a computer screen do. But I still prefer the old word for them, with all its sartorial quaintness: They’ll always be buttons to me.

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