On 2009 Oct 22, at 15:46, Tim Mansour wrote:
DOS or Windows paths used the backslash to show directory hierarchy. And with frequent usage people started saying "slash" where they really meant "backslash", which led to the invention of "forward slash", which emphasises that it's a real slash and not a backslash that's being called a slash. No wonder we're all confused :-)
Linguists have taken note of this phenomenon, which is not at all unique to computing. As you would expect of linguists, they've coined a term for it: retronym.
A retronym is a word or phrase that tacks on a modifier to a noun that previously never needed one, due to the development of some new variation of it. When my mom was baking, she used an oven. Just that: oven. No need to call it a "conventional oven". That particular retronym didn't come along until the microwave oven was introduced.
Our family also used a phone. Not a rotary-dial phone, just a plain old ordinary phone. "Rotary-dial phone" is another retronym, necessitated by the introduction of the touch-tone phone. And, of course, there was no need to specify then (as we must now) that those were "land-line phones", because there was no other kind.
And I suppose the folks over at IBM are still grumbling about the need to stick the word "mainframe" in front of what used to be known simply as a "computer", but I don't have a lot of sympathy for them. Back during WW2, when Alan Turing was leading the Allied effort to crack the German Enigma code, he had at his disposal a room full of computers. They were all human, mainly women with a background in artillery ballistics. After the war, the advent of the "electronic computer" put them all out of work, and after awhile the term "electronic" was dropped because nobody any more thot of "computer" as being a person. AFAICT, nobody ever came up with the retronym "human computer".
So too with "forward slash" to describe something that was simply known as a "slash" for most of its existence.
