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submitted 7 months ago by sxan@midwest.social to c/linguistics@mander.xyz

What are the terms for language anachronisms?

I had a conversation about a year ago with someone about anachronisms in language. We both felt that there were terms for these things, but could neither recall nor find (via web search) satisfying answers. This came up again recently in a different discussion in a Lemmy community, and it's driving me a little nuts. Help me Linguistics-Wan Kenobi; you're my only hope.

So we have the term "skeumorphism," which refers to oramental anachronism. I may be using "anachronism" incorrectly, but it's the hammer I have. Skeumorphisms, in computers, refer to the graphical representations of things, but not the underlying concepts. There are similar linguistic anachronisms that I feel also have specific labels:

  • "disks" which are still in use, but are largely being replaced by solid-state, rectangular SSDs; but most people still call all persistent storage devices "disks."
  • "film" to refer to movies, regardless of the media (increasingly digital and having nothing to do with film).
  • "rice" to refer to the process of fancifying something, like computer desktops
  • "desktops" to refer to computer GUI window managing interfaces
  • "files" and "folders" in computers

Are these all the same category of things? Is there a term for them?

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[-] _Gandalf_the_Black_@feddit.de 4 points 7 months ago

Semantic shift is the process, but there's probably also a term for these words.

this post was submitted on 19 Jan 2024
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