cut/paste

[Mark A Mandel]

On Sat, 7 Jun 2003, Laurence Horn wrote:

        [I said this, but Larry missed the attribution -- MAM]
#>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?

Yes, the latter. And I most usually hear/read "cut and paste" meaning
"copy out of one document and paste into another" for reuse, citation,
etc., rather than referring to rearranging stuff within a single
document.

-- Mark A. Mandel