Pre-Archaic Industrial Jargon

[W Brewer]

Subject: Re: Pre-Archaic Industrial Jargon

Dan Goncharoff wrote: <<The reader doesn't normally select the color of
text on a webpage>> etc. xxx Joel S. Berson wrote: <<But we can. In
Firefox, select Tools / Advanced>> etc. xxx DG: <<And who said we were
talking about a book??>> xxx JB: <<I was. My Yellow Pages are a book.>>

x

At ease, men. Here is what I originally wrote: WB: << Anachronyms. My
favorites are telephone expressions. Hang up your phone, it is off the
hook. Phone is ringing. I dialed the wrong number. Address book. Yellow
pages.>> My message was a stream-of-unconscious list of expressions
surviving social/technological change intact (lexical inertia). The older
Windows software tended to keep familiar terminology to ease the transition
from snail mail to e-mail: mailbox, address book. I now have one foot in
analog telephony and the other on the banana peel of cell phonery. In the
landline era, I used the examples of telephone expressions: Give me a ring
some time. (Bell boxes for desk phones lasted into the mid-20th century.
IMO bells ring; electronic simulations do not, except in an anachronym.)
John hung up on me. (Hanged?) (But he did not take the separate earpiece
and hang it up on the hook of a candlestick phone to break the connection;
he might have put the handset back in its cradle.) I dialed the wrong
number. (Cannot remember the last time I used a pulse dial.) Yellow Pages:
Let your fingers do the walking. (My 87-year-old father has a Yellow Pages
phonebook at home. It is made of paper and the pages are yellow. It is a
quaint curiosity.)

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