In "
Lapsing Into a Comma," I mocked my neighborhood coffee bar for using the unnecessary retronym "country muffin" to distinguish a muffin from an English muffin. After all, I pointed out, referring to an English muffin as a muffin would be like referring to table tennis as "tennis."
The sad thing, half a decade later, is that hearing table tennis referred to as tennis would no longer surprise me:
I've heard people say "custard" when they mean the form of ice cream known as frozen custard. Custard is a very real and extant substance that still needs a name of its own, people. Do you refer to ice cream as "cream"?
I heard a radio host introduce a coach from "the Olympics -- the Special Olympics!" The second part was presented as an amplifier, not a correction.
On a lighter retronym note, I recently caught the "Simpsons" episode in which Kent Brockman refers to "sky stars" to distinguish the luminous celestial objects from the likes of "Matthew Modine and Charlene Tilton."
Hey, let's have a contest! If stars need to be called sky stars, what modifier do we need to insert before "custard" to make it clear we mean custard? And how about "the [blank] Olympics"?
The Not-So-Differently-Abled Olympics
ReplyDeleteSlightly Jiggly Custard
"classic" custard
ReplyDeletelegacy custard
ReplyDeletethe International World Olympics(R)
Uh, can I add one more?
ReplyDeleteCustard 1.0
Old-Timey No Brain Freeze Custard
ReplyDeleteThe Illegally Doped-Up Olympics
"Getting some cookie dough" is more like "getting some chocolate" -- yeah, in context, that makes sense. It's a flavor. But custard is custard. Even simply freezing it doesn't make it that kind of frozen custard. If I say "I'm getting some cream!" at Baskin-Robbins, that doesn't make cream = ice cream.
ReplyDeleteYou know you’re talking about backformation, right? And that “forward slash” became necessary to differentiate it from “backslash”? (For some people, at least. And some others cannot dictate an URL without mistaking slash for backslash.)
ReplyDeleteBack-formation is a different thing, though I guess you could call the process related. I understand that backslashes exist, but people who mean "backslash" say "backslash," just as people who say "table tennis" say "table tennis" -- a mention of "slash" should not prompt the question "You mean backslash?" If we're dealing with people who think URLs ever take backslashes, we need to start at a whole different stage of hand-holding anyway.
ReplyDeleteThe Extra Special Olympics
ReplyDeleteForward Slash Custard
Does this mean that the former guitarist for Guns and Roses is now known as Forward Slash?
Good stuff. The Special -- no, really, we're not using it euphemistically here -- Olympics!
ReplyDeleteOK, fine: Webster's New World does list one meaning of "custard" as "short for frozen custard."
ReplyDeleteBah!
My parents have a milk languauge barrier problem:
ReplyDeleteFull cream milk is called 'Fat Milk' by my mother (milk with lots of fat in it) and 'Thin Milk' by my father (milk for thin people)
Skimmed milk (don't know what you call it in the States -- I mean milk with all the cream taken out) is called 'Thin Milk' by my mother (milk for people trying to become thin) and 'Fat Milk' by my father (milk for fat people).
"Skim milk" used to be the standard stateside term, but the industry has gone to "fat-free milk" of late.
ReplyDeleteI love "fat milk," though of course we do have the term "whole milk."
Supermarkets and such often used to write of their "homo milk" to distinguish it from chocolate milk. I bet the fogies who hmmph about "gay" once meaning "happy" aren't bemoaning that loss.
"Two-parent family" is a wonderful retronym example. Another great one I came across on a list of them: George H.W. Bush!
ReplyDeleteWith gasoline, "regular" is the opposite of "premium" (or, way back when, "ethyl"). I still hear "unleaded" a lot even though there is no "leaded" -- it's in the standard boilerplate of the price-reporting people.
Actually, backslashes work just as well as "forward" slashes do when you're typing URLs. Whether you're visiting http://theslot.blogspot.com/ or http:\\theslot.blogspot.com\, you'll get to the same place.
ReplyDeleteThanks, "woman"; that is news to me -- I hadn't thought to try. Still: While it's nice of the browser makers to auto-correct the error (and note that the backslashes do get changed to slashes when a page loads), it is indeed an error to use the word "backslash" in spelling out a Web address.
ReplyDeleteWindows and DOS file paths (like C:\WINDOWS\directory) always require forward slashes, though. And yes, I've seen text that had backslashes instead.
ReplyDeleteRetronyms and backformations really aren't that similar. Backformations involve reanalyzing a word and then breaking off a supposed morpheme (like taking burglar and creating burgle from it on analogy of words farmer and farm).
Argh. That should be the other way around, of course.
ReplyDelete"Natural breasts"!
ReplyDelete