Linguists, futurists, and, of course, lexigraphers pay close attention to neologisms. New words flag not just new inventions, but new trends, observations, world views. But retronyms also provide markers for the path humanity is taking. In a way, retronyms are more anthropologically pure: they tend to arise in natural discourse rather than being constructed by some marketing department, as neologisms often are. Of course, retronyms must be read from the opposite direction than neologisms: rather than showing what his been invented or discovered, they show what has been surpassed, discarded, superceded.

To remove any doubt, take a quick look at the labels we find on foods:

Sometimes, a new realm of endeavor and discovery will open a whole new domain of retronyms. For example, the vast increase in things digital has created a corresponding expanse of retronyms containing the word analog:

The result has been a subtle shift in the meaning of analog. It used to mean analogous. That is, analog technologies somehow modelled the things they represented. For example, the analog clock face is actually an analog of the day: like the day, it is a circle, noon at the highest point. The tremelo oscillator in an analog synthesizer fluctuates analogously to the tremulous motion of a violinist’s bow; that is, its physical state phases, trembles, oscillates. The grooves of a phonograph record actually rise and fall in direct correspondence to the speaker cone going in and out. (And thus they also model the sympathetic vibrations of the listener’s eardrum.) A compact disc, on the other hand, delivers a series of numbers to an analog converter that accomplishes the same thing, but there is no physical model–no analog–of the sound on the disc.

Through its use as a retro-prefix for digitized pursuits, the word analog has lost much of its resonant relationship with analogous or analogy. As analog technologies have been bested by digital methods in model-making, computation, and the arts, the term analog has been relegated to simply meaning "not digital." Thus, whereas digital denotes quantification, discrete amounts, and binary representation, analog now connotes the infinitesimal points between the ticks of the scale, the irrational numbers hidden on the number line, the radio dial that can be tuned to the static between stations. In short, analog is any place where we can escape from the tyranny of exact quantification.

A friend of mine, a professional digital artist (master of pixels and RGB values–the quanta of the computer screen), recently headed to Africa for a year of painting. She called it "going analog." As humanity represents more and more with numbers, we become gradually aware of what numbers fail to represent. The word for this missing substance is analog: a new meaning for an old word; an aspect of reality newly recognized as it has been left behind, suddenly more precious in its eleventh hour.

Computer geeks often say "Analog is lossy," because analog signals always lose some fidelity: tape your LPs, and the copy sounds blurrier than the original; burn a copy of a CD, and copy and original are exactly the same. So perhaps the word "analog" will come to stand for loss itself, the memory fading like a multi-generation dub, the rumble of vinyl surface noise, or the sepia of our grandparents’ wedding photos. And just as neologisms are the markers of progress, retronyms will become the markers of nostalgia and absence, stored inexactly, as if on wax cylinders in the lossy stations of the heart.

Scott Westerfeld’s brand-spankin’-new novel, EVOLUTION’S DARLING, is now available on Four Walls Eight Windows.