Originally Posted by Monty
The other day on the subway in Busan, someone’s cell phone rang, with a ring-tone of the traditional telephone ring. Everyone on the car stopped talking and looked towards the ringing phone to see who had such an odd thing.
Me, too. I wanted my phone to sound like a phone ringing, not play me a song.
As for the topic, um, “draw a bath”? I got nothin’.
From Dictionary.com:
I would argue that these aren’t outdated or anachronistic, but that they’ve obtained new meanings. After all, you used to “drive” a horse-drawn carriage, but that doesn’t mean that truck "drive"rs are jovially thinking of horse-drawn carriages when they use the word. So “ring” is both something a bell does and something a telephone does. Logging in is not anachronistic, either; you enter your name and the date and time you arrived into a file on the computer called a log, which is no further removed from the practice of signing a log book than the latter is from the use of literal logs. “Talking” on AIM may not involve your voice, but “talking” on the phone doesn’t involve seeing each others’ faces, which was one of the defining characteristics of talking before that invention came around. I would argue that once a new generation doesn’t realize a term is anachronistic, as robardin alluded to, that term is no longer anachronistic. Of course, that comes from a Chomskyan viewpoint of language as something defined by its usage by native speakers, so JMHO.
As for the Teamsters thing, it doesn’t pay to be too literal about which union employs whom–for example, teachers at San Diego State University belong to United Auto Workers.
…Which adds an entry to that website’s log, doesn’t it?
how about the old phrase “pegging out” the meter?
(such as a tachometer or an audio volume meter on old tape decks).
A pretty common one–we call our TV remote a clicker, in deference to the olden days when they actually clicked because they operated by mechanically whacking a set of tiny metal bars and making some inaudible harmonics which were picked up by the TV set. Unca Cecil has a column on the subject.
All landline phones still use dialtones. You might not hear it in some new phones, but rest assured it’s there.
I turn on the light, and the TV and the computer, even though none of them have controls that requiring turning.
Quite a few breweries in the U.K. have a team or two for show, and I expect that their drivers are members of the TGWU section of Unite.
One meaning of “to turn” is to change state - for example, leaves turn color in the fall and food turns bad when it’s kept too long. Turning on an electrical device comes from this meaning, not from the meaning having to do with rotation (although it seems likely that the latter meaning is derived from the first). So, I don’t think this is a good example of legacy language.
Apart from turning a different colour, and food turning bad, almost every other meanings of “turn” involves moving, literally or figuratively (the turn of the seasons) through an arc and Merriam-Websters define “turn on” as “to activate or cause to flow, operate, or function by or as if by turning a control”.
Although I don’t have access to quotes from the mid 19th century, or the devices referred to*, I do have access to a different language, and in Norwegian you “turn” things on as well, with the verb having no meanings unrelated to circular motion, except when refering to flipping a switch.
So unless I see evidence to the contrary, I’ll continue believing “turn on” comes from circular motion controls.
*I mean, it doesn’t help me to find a quote for “turn on” unless there’s also some information about the mechanics of the control mentioned.
Why, were there pegs on the volume meters? I don’t get it.
I always thought this was a Cribbage reference (a very old and popular card game), where one advances a peg on a board with holes in it to indicate one’s point total, and winning (indicated by finishing the track first) is called “pegging out”.
By analogy, anything that has a track with dots or indicators on it, and something that increments along that track, can be said to “peg out” if it goes beyond the maximum limit.
If the needle rested on the left and moved right to indicate increasing X, at the extreme right, there would be a peg to stop the motion of the needle. If X reached the maximum measurable by the needle, the needle would be pressed against the peg – “pegged.”
How about turning Japanese, turning red, turning dark, turning metal/stone/wood, and turning X into Y?
And a sudden, extreme noise or input could “bury the needle,” ie smash it so hard against the peg that it stuck or broke.
Yes, and the victory cry of Cha-ching, or Ka-ching, only makes sense to those who remember those old mechanical cash registers.
I thought “burying the needle” referred to the way that some analog gauges exposed only the valid measurement range that the needle could traverse. Thus at either end of the valid range, the needle would disappear from view, appearing to be “buried” by whatever obscured the rest of the range.
That, too.
In computing, the term “core” to mean RAM is preserved from the era of ferrite-core memory. When a program crashes under Unix, it might “dump core”: Write a file named “core” with the contents of a portion of RAM to disk, so someone with a debugger can figure out what failed.
I’ve been searching the Web to come up with a picture of a needle gauge with a peg, but I’m coming up empty.
We still use the term telegraph poles in the UK even though they have carried only telephone wires for a century.