Of course some obsolete terminology persists. But everybody knows what an email is, and everybody calls it that. Do you still talk about sending “letters”? Nobody talked about Hillary Clinton’s “memos”. Why are diplomats uniquely idiosyncratic?
Because diplomats receive both emails and cables and the two have important differences even if they now may show up in the same tool.
It’s no that different from receiving a memo by email. Hillary Clinton’s email may have included memos, but there’s no reason to assume they were exclusively such, or that the memos were more important that other missives in the leak. For Diplomatic emails on the other hand the cables are a particularly important subset.
I occasionally slip up and call the TV remote control the “clicker,” though they haven’t clicked in decades. Remember having to click all the way around the dial again, when you accidentally clicked past the channel you wanted?
Video is derived from the medium (video tape rather than film) as well.
But it’s a modifier of tape, indicating that it’s a visual medium. I don’t think the word “video” in itself carries any historical baggage concerning the medium, there’s nothing unusual about the etymology of (say) “digital video”.
The early NTSC standards, etc. use the terms video and audio to describe the components of a TV signal. Video tape didn’t become a commercial thing until 1956.
I don’t, but I do remember our first cable TV remote, which was wired and had two tiers of channels (1-12 and 13-24, IIRC) but only 1 row of buttons, with a rocker switch on the side to select which set of channels you wanted your button press to select. Talk about a two-click rule!
Yep, looks like I’m wrong here. Apologies, I should have been more careful in GQ.
Well, if you’re deliberately ignoring context and pragmatics, “recording” something was never anything home enthusiasts could do.
But I suppose even the people around here will fail to see my point.