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?
The process itself is known as semantic change, or semantic drift - you have a bunch of meanings that are associated with a morpheme, word or expression, and they changed over time. You can read further about it here.
In special, your examples seem to be, for me:
I’m really unsure on ⟨rice⟩.
IIRC “rice” comes from people who would mod Japanese imported cars. It has since been adopted by other hobby communities that like to “trick out” their stuff for aesthetic reasons. Particularly IME the Unix UI modding community.
Thanks. I had to look at the full chain to know the changes that happened, it seems to be fairly complex:
I’m not too sure on the chain, but it should be something like this.