
The ghosts of technology in today’s language (2018) - takinola
https://medium.com/@mwichary/the-ghost-tech-in-todays-language-c3becc9ae30b
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mrob
One not included in the article: "balls-out", meaning "extreme" or "as fast as
possible". It's thought to originate (although I haven't seen any
authoritative sources for this) with centrifugal governors, which used
spinning balls to regulate the speed of mechanical devices:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centrifugal_governor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centrifugal_governor)

~~~
gumby
By the way, forcibly moderating the speed by grasping the governor was
referred to in Victorian times (not making this up) as "cupping the governor's
balls" which was one of those "plausible deniability" phrases (it was
literally true so if someone objected _they_ were the ones with the dirty
mind).

~~~
mirimir
But those people _knew_ that they were being risque, right?

~~~
gumby
I’m sure, yes.

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maestrokuro
How uncanny. I was thinking about this in one of my lectures today after
seeing that my lecturer spelt "online" as "on line" in one of his presentation
slides. It turns out that the origin of the term "on line" dates back all the
way to the telegraph industry!

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49531
If y'all don't follow Marcin Wichary on Twitter you're missing out on a lot of
great content. He's consistently highlighting interesting intersections of
history, technology, and how humans live within it all.

Twitter can often times be an unpleasant place and he's always a bright spot
in the noise: [https://twitter.com/mwichary](https://twitter.com/mwichary)

~~~
49531
Here is one of my favorite threads by Marcin:
[https://twitter.com/mwichary/status/996056615928266752](https://twitter.com/mwichary/status/996056615928266752)

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rdiddly
"Album" meaning "blank tablet" in Latin is interesting because it seems to
have the word "white" in it, same as in albumen (egg whites) and Albion (home
of the White Cliffs).

~~~
NeedMoreTea
Albion comes from early Celtic rather than Latin. Originally naming all of
Britain it changed at some point to refer to just Scotland, and gave the
modern Scots Gaelic of Alba for Scotland.

~~~
seszett
Does Albion really mean Scotland in English? It means England in French.

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smcl
There's no real common modern usage of "Albion" except in the name of football
teams (West Bromwich Albion, Albion Rovers, Stirling Albion) - so it doesn't
really mean one more than the other in _English_. Some people might say it
comes from an old celtic word and therefore refers to Scotland, others might
say it's from Latin and refers to England or the whole island of Britain. I've
no idea which is "right" but the word just doesn't come up in everyday
English.

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jacobolus
> _what would be the oldest extant word based on technology no longer in use_

Hard to beat “calculate”, which is about finding numerical answers by moving
pebbles around a counting board.

~~~
Retric
Many of these technologies are really old, burning the midnight oil refers to
oil lamps that date back at lest, 15,000 years ago. Various sailing references
date back a minimum of 7,500 years old but could easily be much older
technology.

Computing via moving pebbles could easily be a surprisingly recent idea ~500
BCE, but again it’s very difficult to date this stuff.

~~~
jacobolus
> _Computing via moving pebbles could easily be a surprisingly recent idea
> ~500 BCE_

By the 5th century BCE, Herodotus was writing about how Egyptians and Hellenes
used their counting boards in different ways; by that point the technology was
apparently widespread and taken for granted.

It’s hard to judge when a counting board with an explicit place-value system
(where the tokens could represent different quantities depending on position)
first arose, but I’d guess no later than like 2000 BCE, and possibly much
earlier.

If you allow “pebbles” to also include little clay counters, and counting with
them to include piling them up and changing units by trading one type of
counter for another, then we have physical examples from 7500 BCE.

We have much older evidence still of counting via tally marks, because as
archaeological evidence those are relatively easy to interpret. If people
longer ago were counting with pebbles there’s almost no way we’d know it.

* * *

> _burning the midnight oil refers to oil lamps that date back at lest, 15,000
> years ago_

I take this phrase to mean doing some kind of scholarly work (reading/writing)
late into the night. Apparently comes from Quarles (1635), _Emblemes_ : “Wee
spend our mid-day sweat, or mid-night oyle; Wee tyre the night in thought; the
day in toyle.” So while burning stuff to make light is an old technology, this
is not too old a metaphor.

Can you think of sailing metaphors which etymologically arose thousands of
years ago, in forms still used? Obviously literal words like “ship”, “mast”,
“row”, “sheet”, “wind”, “knot”, etc. are very old.

Also, sailing is a technology still in use. :-)

~~~
Retric
> If you allow “pebbles” to also include little clay counters, and counting
> with them to include piling them up and changing units by trading one type
> of counter for another, then we have physical examples from 7500 BCE.

What’s your source on that? I would be really interested in checking it out.

~~~
jacobolus
Check out Denise Schmandt-Besserat’s work,
[http://sites.utexas.edu/dsb/tokens/](http://sites.utexas.edu/dsb/tokens/)

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WalterBright
Electric cars still have a gas pedal :-)

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notzuck
No they don't. You just use the wrong word. Try accelerator.

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saagarjha
But the steering wheel is an accelerator too…

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notzuck
So is gravity when your going down hill, somethings can have the same name, so
what?

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saagarjha
Gravity isn’t a control in your car.

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bsder
One of my favorites is from VLSI. Finishing a chip is still called "Tape out"
even though we quit using magtape for sending the design files to fab years
ago.

~~~
mrob
Didn't that refer to the adhesive tape used for hand-drawing optical masks?

~~~
bsder
Perhaps, but I don't remember it in that context. Maybe someone older than me
might remember.

I do remember it from back when we used to mail reel-to-reel magtapes around.

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jolmg
Cassette. That was a household word, right? Both for video and music
cassettes. I haven't heard that word in many years, now.

~~~
tefferon
bicycles have a cassette of gears

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jolmg
I didn't know that was called a cassette. I always assumed cassettes were a
type of cartridge with reeled tape.

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kibwen
The etymology of English "cassette" appears to come from the French word for
"little box", which makes sense for tape cassettes but not for bicycle
gearing. Considering that bicycle cassettes were invented in the 70s whereas
tape cassettes are from the 60s, I'd be curious to know the reason for the
name.

[https://www.etymonline.com/word/cassette](https://www.etymonline.com/word/cassette)

~~~
NeedMoreTea
Little box to hold a removable piece or mechanism, so seems a bit of a stretch
unless cassette gears pop out for replacement? There were far earlier uses.
The box that held the glass plates in early plate cameras was called a
cassette.

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bencollier49
Round our way if something is rubbish, it's often referred to as "bobbins":

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bobbin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bobbin)

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aitchnyu
Checks and balances refers to James Watt era machinery. IIRC, couldn't google.

Kubernetes/Cyber/Gubernotorial/Governor means rudder.

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mkoryak
They should have also mentioned the word "modem", which is actually an
abbreviation but not many people know that.

~~~
jacobolus
Nobody uses the word “modem” anymore; it isn’t a metaphor that worked its way
into general speech.

It’s just a dead word for a dead technology.

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salawat
The heck? Modulator/demodulator is still used. In fact, I generally have great
success in using it to illustrate the demarcation between LAN and WAN for non
techie users.

Your LAN ends at your router. Your WAN begins at your modem. Your modem is the
thing the ISP gives that gives you access to the Internet.

While it doesn't do the heavy lifting of converting digital traffic to/from
analog signals anymore, it makes a very good nominative identifier for the
particular purpose of identifying the piece of hardware that still fulfills
the role of enabling connectivity with the world at large.

~~~
jacobolus
Yes, but people used to know that “modem” = “those funny noises on your phone
line”.

Now laypeople don’t have a “modem”, they just have “that internet box the ISP
technician plugged in when I signed up”.

The word modem went out of popular currency too fast for it to ever spawn the
kinds of more general metaphors we are talking about in this discussion.

~~~
hiccuphippo
We still have cable-modems in some parts of the world.

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hemmert
A couple of years ago, I gave a TEDx talk on "how our body understands the
digital world", which also picks up the topic of language/tech metaphors:

[https://youtube.com/watch?v=oXWyfFyWACI](https://youtube.com/watch?v=oXWyfFyWACI)

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amitnishad
thanks for technology language easy to help
[https://www.alltopinterviewquestions.com](https://www.alltopinterviewquestions.com)

