cut/paste

[Laurence Horn]

>On Sat, 7 Jun 2003, Laurence Horn wrote:
>
>#At 1:40 PM -0400 6/7/03, James A. Landau wrote:
>#>
>#>"cut and paste" long antedates computers.  It originally meant exactly what
>#>it says---to move things around in a typewritten or handwritten
>document, you
>#>cut out the words with scissors or a knife and then pasted them
>with paste or
>#>cement where you wanted them to go.
>
>Am I the only one who notices when people say this in a computer context
>when they really mean "copy and paste"?
>
Do they?  What's *usually* meant is indeed for cutting and pasting,
where the moved element is no longer where it once was (rather than
just creating a duplicate copy), so ABCD turns into ACDB, say, rather
than ABCDB, and thereby B is cut and then pasted onto the end.  In
Macintoshese, this is command-X (cut) followed by command-V (paste),
not command-C(copy)/command-V.  Are you referring to the latter
practice as copy-and-paste?

larry