What we used to call, simply, "books," for example, we now call hardcover books because of the production of paperback books. What was once simply a guitar is now an acoustic guitar because of the popularity of electric guitars. What was once just soap is now called bar soap since the invention of powdered and liquid soaps.
Frank Mankiewicz, once an aide to Robert Kennedy, invented a term for these new compounds. He called them "retronyms," using the classical word parts retro, "back," and nym, "name or word." A retronym is an adjective-noun pairing generated by a change in the meaning of the noun, usually because of advances in technology. Retronyms, like retrospectives, are backward glances.
When I grew up, there were only Coke, turf and mail. Nowadays, Diet Coke, new Coke, artificial turf, and e-mail (electronic mail) have spawned the retronyms real Coke, Classic Coke, natural turf and snail mail or hard mail. Once there were simply movies. Then movies began to talk, necessitating the retronym silent movies. Then came color movies and the contrasting term black-and-white movies. Once there was television. Along came color television and the retronym black-and-white television. Then came cable television and the retronym on-air television.
Even time, which used to wait for no man, now does because it can be captured on audio and videotape. As a result, we now have something called real time. Once, all we had was reality -- what could be more real? Now we have virtual reality. So what are the retronyms -- unreal time and actual reality?
I remember being astonished when one of my students at St. Paul's School told me that he had missed my class because he has set his alarm for a.m. rather than p.m. On our old clocks, that would have been impossible, but on digital clocks it happens all the time. So what used to be just a clock (or watch) is now an analog, versus a digital, clock.
Other retronyms we use today include:
Coining a retronym for an object is sometimes like waving it a nostalgic goodbye. Retronyms can signal that the thing double-labeled has become outmoded and obsolete, the superseded exception rather than the rule. This is what has happened to black-and-white TV, manual typewriters, treadle sewing machines, reel-to-reel tape recorders, and rotary phones.
Given the dizzying pace of commercial innovations, retronyms are bound to keep on coming. Any day now, we'll have brand new retronyms such as corded telephone, phoneless car, low-definition TV and nonmicrowave oven.
What with phone sex and safe sex, could we one day have the retronym full-participation sex? I hope not. And here are some other retronyms I pray will never come to pass -- graffitiless wall, nonelectronic book, teacher-staffed school, monogamous couple and double-parent family.
© Richard Lederer
Those are 25 ways of saying that, if variety is the spice of life, slang is the spice of language.
In Flappers 2 Rappers: American Youth Slang (Merriam- Webster) master storyteller and slangmeister Tom Dalzell offers an engaging overview of the slang used by teens from the 1890s to the 1990s. Dalzell's joy ride through our American slanguage covers every flip, hip, hop, jive snip of spectacular vernacular ever dropped by hipsters, tipsters, finger-poppin' daddies and guys and dolls -- the extraordinary vocabulary of way bad dudes and uptown downtown all around the town showcasing groovers.
Wordaholics everywhere now have a rich new brew to slake their unremitting thirst for language fun. Paul Dickson, author of several shelves of books on all matters linguistic, has teamed with Merriam-Webster. Dickson, author of such popular language titles as The Dickson Baseball Dictionary, Slang!, and What's In a Name?, has become the consulting editor for a new line of Merriam- Webster books that celebrate the whimsical side of language.
You wouldn't think that a bunch of dictionary-making academics would start a series exploring the lighter side of language, but the Merriam-Webster folks in Springfield, Mass., are authentic logolepts and verbivores who love the play of words just as much as the rest of us.
The first fruits of the relationship between Dickson and Merriam-Webster are Dickson's What's In a Name? and Tom Dalzell's Flappers 2 Rappers. Dalzell admits to being a middle-aged white-bread guy who grew up in the lap of luxury. After graduating from a posh private school on Philadelphia's Main Line and receiving a BA from the University of Pennsylvania, he headed west and for eight years worked for Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers Movement. He became a hunter-gatherer of slang while researching period slang for a novel he was writing. He put the novel aside as the language research piqued his interest. Ten years later, his slang library of more than 1,000 books and 2,000 articles and his e-mail address, which begins with the name slangman, speak volumes about the degree of his obsession.
The clearest sense of the energy powering Flappers 2 Rappers streams from Tom Dalzell's own words at the end of his introduction: "Pick up on this riff you sharp cats and kitties. Heed these syllables you ditty boppers. Drape yourself in shape 'cause here's a hot flash of ecstatic static, . . . some real gone jive guaranteed to sharpen your game! Let me lay it on you! Let these words wake you! I mean it and how -- Boot it, shoot it hang with this slang and reep these righteous words. Don't vegetate, percolate! Here it be!!!!! Let it roll, let it all roll!!!!!"
Although it is tempting to think that the language spoken by today's teens is a members-only secret tongue, consider that the current faves fly, homey, icy, and jell date back at least to the days when FDR lived in the White House. In an e-interview, Dalzall observed, "Despite the sense that slang is inventive and constantly replenished, to a startling degree there is not much new. Slang is governed by the law of natural selection: only the strong survive. At any given moment, there are many slang words and expressions in play, most of which won't be heard in a few months. When a good word or expression gets tired, it is discarded but somehow not forgotten. By a puzzling process, slang gets recycled. After sitting out a generation or more, words come back, sometimes bigger than ever":
© Richard Lederer
Top of Page
Home